Tonight, the veil is thin. In many cultures, All Hallows’ Eve marks a moment of rupture: the night the boundaries between the visible world and the underworld dissolve. As the sun sets, kids (and adults) will engage in ritual masquerade, donning personas and masks, and explore their communities. Our neighborhoods invite ghosts, princesses, monsters, and superhero icons into our world as representations of aspects of our psyche and imagination.
I’m not sure how you feel about Halloween or celebrate it. There are pictures of my kids on my wall, and when I write and work during the day, over time I’ve developed a “practice” of letting them “watch” me, if that makes sense. It was an idea for a hybrid spiritual/mental practice, and it’s helped. So, sometimes, I write to them. My kids have huge imaginations and wonderful creativity. They love reading, and fantasy is among their favorites. Everything from Harry Potter, which my eldest has probably read more than a dozen times now, to Percy Jackson and The Lord of the Rings. And, for Halloween, I wanted to write something they might enjoy when they’re older.
A couple of years ago, I rewatched Labyrinth. The first and only time I saw it before, I don’t recall. What I did remember was that I didn’t like it. It creeped me out. Watching it in my late 30’s with some perspective and on a spiritual recovery journey was a different experience. If you haven’t watched it before, some parents will want to check it out first, because there are some “creepy” parts, and a package…if you know you know.
So, let’s set the scene and explore a bit what I learned from the Labyrinth and how Jonah offers a compelling Scriptural counter-narrative. Maybe we all can learn something from the Goblin King.
The Descent We All Must Make
“The path of descent is the path of transformation. Darkness, failure, relapse, death, and woundedness are our primary teachers, rather than ideas or doctrines.”
— Richard Rohr
Descent has been a theme in my research for the last few years, and I was practicing it for a few years before. Descent in storytelling and myth is almost unavoidable, unless you like complete, linear, predictable, and basic stories. Life sure as heck doesn’t play out that way. Descent in life, as humans, is something we should talk about. It happens.
This part may lose some readers, and I invite them to take this proposition with logic and Scripture in mind, and to wrestle with it as Bereans. This is what Jesus meant when he told Nicodemus, “How can the Son of Man rise unless he descends?” (John 3:13–17, worth pausing to read). The Son of Man, a title for humanity, not just Jesus, was speaking to all of us. The only way we rise is by first going down. This is how we are reborn (literally, “born from above” (John 3:3) and clear out the selfish, stuck ways of thinking and being so that we may be alive, free, and inhabited by the Spirit. When the old, false selves die away, the true self can emerge as God intended.
This ritual descent into the subterranean realm of the self, what mythicists call katabasis, is not an abstract event. It is the terrifying, necessary work of metanoia: the radical change of mind and heart required to awaken. The spiritual life demands the death of the constructed false self so that the real Self can emerge. As Jung pointed out, “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
Two seemingly disparate narratives perfectly map this psychological and spiritual descent: the 1986 fantasy film Labyrinth and the biblical book of Jonah. Both feature an unwilling protagonist forced out of their static “Ordinary World” and into a chaotic, subterranean “Unknown World.” But while Sarah completes her journey to achieve personal freedom and ontological sovereignty, Jonah achieves only obedience, his soul remaining trapped in the darkness of the Elder Son archetype, where religious pride performs but can never be a friend.
⚠️ SPOILER ALERTS (but It’s been 20 years!)
Sarah’s Story: The Labyrinth as Inner World
Sarah, the teenage protagonist of Labyrinth, begins her story absorbed in fantasy role-playing, reciting lines from her favorite book in a park. She imagines herself as a heroine in a magical story, but when rain interrupts her, she must rush home—reminding us she’s still stuck in an ordinary world.
At home, Sarah argues with her stepmother and feels alienated. She resents her baby half-brother Toby, whom she’s forced to babysit while her parents go out. Her room reveals her imagination—fairy-tale posters, stuffed animals, and books that echo the coming adventure. She’s resentful, self-pitying, and stubbornly clinging to the safe, predictable world of childhood fantasy, resisting the responsibility of adulthood and family.
The call to adventure comes through her own words. Frustrated, Sarah recites a line from her book: “I wish the goblins would come and take you away—right now.” This selfish plea, made in a moment of childish grandiosity, is immediately answered. The power of her words triggers magic: the goblins actually do take Toby. She got what she wished for.
Jareth, the Goblin King, appears and offers Sarah her dreams if she lets him keep Toby. And she refuses.
The elder child, upset with her parents, disconnected in a blended family, and nursing a bit of a 13-year-old ego, now realizes her mistake and what she must do to undo a moment of impulsive weakness. Jareth is her challenge: she must navigate his Labyrinth and reach his castle within thirteen hours to rescue Toby, or he becomes a goblin forever.
The world shifts; she’s no longer pretending—it’s real now. She must overcome the Labyrinth.
The Inner Journey Through the Mind
The Labyrinth is in Sarah’s mind. It all happens within her imagination. She will have to deal with her sexuality, her pride and arrogance, her selfishness, and her self-confidence. As she journeys through the Labyrinth, she’s actually journeying through her mind. And the characters are manifestations of either herself or her fears, and the characters in her life. In fact, many of the characters appear in her bedroom as part of the “junk” she has to reject and no longer collect as tokens of a childhood identity.
Jareth is not merely a conventional villain. He is the Animus1 and the Shadow projected outward — the manipulative, charismatic, dominating masculine energy Sarah must learn to integrate. The Labyrinth itself is her unconscious psyche: a unicursal maze designed not to trap her but to lead her toward the Innermost Cave. Every deceptive shortcut, ally, and adversary is calibrated to strip away dependence on the illusion of external control and force interior reclamation.
Sarah stands before a massive stone maze. She meets the worm, a tiny blue creature who offers cryptic help, hinting that things aren’t what they seem. These are the gatekeepers testing: Is she worthy? Capable?
The labyrinth seems endless; walls move, directions twist. Sarah begins to realize logic doesn’t apply here. She meets Hoggle, a grumpy dwarf who kills fairies and reluctantly becomes her first companion. He’s two-faced, and tries to be honest about it as a way of escaping his own responsibility. Squint and tilt your head, and you may see Jonah in him. By the end, Hoggle has his own hero’s journey and redemption moment. It’s kind of beautiful to a 40-year-old male like myself.
As Sarah navigates different dilemmas, she’s also learning lessons about herself and adult life. Later on, Hoggle will give Eve…I mean, Sarah, a poisoned fruit that intoxicates her. Suddenly, she’s thrust into a human world as a masquerade ball, where David Bowie basically flirts seductively with her. It’s after this that she awakens in the junkyard and has to reject the appearances of her childhood tokens and trinkets, the false identities she was trying to hold on to.
These are intentionally set together—Jareth alternates between threatening and seducing Sarah, appearing in dreamlike visions, offering her forgetfulness, pleasure, or obedience, while the junkyard thrusts her back into her childhood and false identities she was trying to hold on to. She has to reject both.
The Moment of Ego Death
Inside the castle, Sarah faces the surreal Escher-like stairway scene, chasing Toby through impossible geometry while Jareth sings “Within You.” It’s both a literal and psychological showdown—her final confrontation with Jareth and illusion, fear, and the seduction of control.
The stakes are raised when Jareth makes his desperate, final offer—the ultimate temptation to return to the security of the false self: “Everything that you wanted I have done. You asked that the child be taken; I took him. You cowered before me; I was frightening. I have reordered time, I have turned the world upside down, and I have done it all for you! I am exhausted from living up to your expectations of me. Isn’t that generous?…”
This plea exposes the fragile persona behind Jareth’s power. His tyranny is, fundamentally, a reflection of Sarah’s own childish wants. His authority is proportional to her immaturity. In claiming that his exhaustion is due to her expectations, he reveals that her ego—her inner demand for a fantasy world—has been sustaining his existence. He finishes his last attempt with:
“…Love me, fear me, do as I say, and I will be your slave.”
Sarah’s moment of rebirth is not a physical blow; it is an ontological realization that shatters the illusion. She recites the final lines from her book—the ones she could never remember earlier:
“Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, I have fought my way here to the castle beyond the Goblin City to take back the child that you have stolen. For my will is as strong as yours, and my kingdom as great… You have no power over me.”
This is her surrendering of childish ego and standing free as herself. As a result, Jareth’s kingdom collapses. And Sarah walks out of the Labryinth with a treasure she never knew she had. By claiming her own will and kingdom, she asserts her internal sovereignty, ending the reign of the Goblin King. The Labyrinth is no longer a maze she has to be trapped in. She reclaims her agency and wakes in her room, and Toby is safe.
Sarah has grown and can love now. Her fantasy toys now seem like old friends rather than escapes. Yet, when her companions appear in her mirror to celebrate, she realizes she can still love imagination without losing reality. The film ends with the goblins and friends joyfully dancing, suggesting the integration of both worlds: maturity and imagination, responsibility and wonder.
As Sarah’s descent was voluntary, Jonah’s was self-imposed: two mirrors of the same psychology reacting to the Divine.
Jonah: The Descent That Failed
Both Sarah and Jonah meet the trickster. The trickster mocks certainty and forces confrontation with the parts we hide. In Labyrinth, Jareth embodies it. Psychologically, this is the same force that sabotages our growth when change feels too costly. It’s the self-sabotage, manic flight, and compulsion to run just when we’re closest to vulnerability. The trickster hates responsibility. Jonah’s flight from God wasn’t simple disobedience; it was his trickster running away and collapsing inward, resisting transformation by disguising rebellion as righteousness.
For about a year, the story of Jonah had been “haunting” me. It started a couple of years ago when, walking in my living room, a thought or voice hit me with “You’re Jonah.” It was spot on then and drove some of the changes in my life. I was my own trickster runamok. Jonah has since been on my mind and popped up a couple of times in my Scripture reading.
For example, Matthew 12:39-41:
“But he answered them, ‘An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.'”
The Son of Man, again, is a title not exclusive to Jesus, and purposely so. It wasn’t a “divine” title but one for every human, as evidenced by Ezekiel being called it over 90 times. Here, in Matthew, Jesus was trying to make a point, as the Scripture writers recorded brilliantly. His point was: humanity is going to descend into the Belly of the Beast. But it will rise, even if it is like Jonah and be spit out. And they were like Jonah.
The journey of the prophet Jonah maps the tragedy of the uncompleted spiritual quest—the failure to achieve true metanoia (radical change of mind and heart), despite surviving the ordeal. Jonah begins his story not as an immature girl, but as a proud, established religious figure whose identity is trapped in theological certainty and rigid nationalism.
When God commands him, “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it,” Jonah flees. He is not afraid of failure; he is afraid of God’s grace. He knows God is “a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love,” and he fears Nineveh, Israel’s enemy, will repent and be spared, thus invalidating his tribal pride.
Unlike Sarah’s chosen quest, Jonah’s descent is coerced. He is thrown into the sea and swallowed by the great fish, descending into the pit. The whale’s belly functions as a dark underworld, a forced pause designed to make him stop fleeing and turn inward. This physical descent is symbolic of death and rebirth, forcing Jonah to confront mortality and submit to God’s will.
However, Jonah’s repentance inside the fish is temporary—an act of stubborn submission, not metanoia. He is vomited out, delivers his prophecy, and Nineveh repents, avoiding judgment.
The Elder Son Who Refused to Celebrate
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
— Carl Jung
This outcome triggers Jonah’s true psychological failure: theological resentment and egoic entitlement. He sits outside the city, furious, convinced that God will still destroy the city, and probably thinking God betrayed him by choosing mercy over vengeance. He is the quintessential Elder Son from the Prodigal Son parable. The Elder Son, obedient and performing, refuses to join the celebration of grace. His self-justification was chilling: “All these years I’ve slaved for you and never once refused to do a single thing you told me to.”
Jonah’s failure becomes fatal. He is driven by rigid, punitive certainty that cannot access empathy. He lacks the capacity for compassion, relatedness, and vulnerability that would allow him to integrate the journey he’s been through.
Jonah’s ego is so fragile that it values the comfort of a temporary plant over the souls of an entire city. His anger is an act of cruelty, a refusal to soften towards the divinity that offers transfiguration. Before the book ends, God will try one last thing to see if he can get through to Jonah’s hard heart.
In many ways, Jonah is the Goblin King of Israel’s prophetic imagination—a kind of Jareth who refuses redemption to others, a Pharaoh dressed in prophet’s robes, discontent with the mercy of his own calling. His labyrinth is spiritual, not physical; his goblins are doctrines and grudges that obey his wounded pride.
God challenges him with an object lesson in compassion: Jonah is granted shade by a plant, but when it withers, he expresses profound pity and agony over the dead object. God responds: “You pity the plant… should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons… and also much cattle?”
And this is how the biblical narrative of Jonah ends: with God asking a question, and without Jonah’s response. The story is written to make every reader sit in Jonah’s spot and wrestle with the same point God was trying to make Jonah get. It’s like Scripture is asking us, “Do you get it?”
There is no answer, and Jonah remains in his labyrinth as the scene fades to black and the end credits roll.
Two Paths, One Choice
“Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.”
— Augustine of Hippo
The parallel journeys of Sarah and Jonah delineate the single, essential choice of spiritual transformation: surrender or stagnation.
Sarah, through facing her Shadow and integrating her will, achieved wholeness. She chose the messy, frightening path of responsibility and family, trading the illusion of childish control for the hard-won gift of self-sovereignty. Her victory is a family victory, returning the stolen child and returning to her stepmother with maturity. She became the embodiment of the necessary fusion of decisiveness and vulnerability.
Jonah, by contrast, survived the external ordeal but failed the internal test. He refused compassion’s call, choosing the comforting dogma of his Elder Son ego over the expansive, terrifying love of God. His life remains an eternal monument to the spirit that chooses to pout, rather than to participate in grace.
The veil is always thin. The challenge is not external; it is psychological, ontological. The underworld of the self waits for us all. The cruciform path of descent, death, and union is not an optional course but the unavoidable way to becoming fully human—the awakening of the Son of Man archetype within. Descent without integration is just survival, not transformation. Resurrection requires facing the darkness we once fled; only then can light become more than a metaphor.
Like Sarah, we must risk the dissolution of the mask, enter the labyrinth of our own choosing, and declare our freedom from the internal kings we ourselves enthroned. Regardless, let’s look at Jonah’s story and him as a man. Because by the very last verse of the book, we understand what he refused to understand: that descent without integration is just a story we survived, not a transformation we completed.
So, unashamedly and with God’s blessing, Happy Halloween. Celebrate it or don’t; whatever you do, do it gratefully, loving God, our neighbor, and ourselves in it, and everything else will be fine. May we all have the courage to say, “You have no power over me,” not just to external goblins and demons, but to the tyrannical false selves and fake enemies we’ve been sustaining all along. Go ahead, and wear the masks and don the costumes of your imagination and inner being, of fears and strengths, and those things that no longer haunt us in the night. It was always in our minds anyway.
“Only through an inner spiritual transformation do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit.”
— Martin Luther King Jr.
- In Jungian language, the Animus represents the inner masculine energy in women, often encountered first as projection. ↩︎
