Halloween’s Real Significance: Per Ankh Celebrates Ancestors Day

By Dave Hodges,
Pastor of Church of Ambrosia

This Halloween night in Detroit, something ancient is reappearing. Per Ankh House of Life Church is celebrating “Ancestors Day.” And on that day, the first 100 members showing up in costume will receive a free eighth of psychedelic mushrooms. Adults who join within 30 days receive free memberships. But the day isn’t just about free mushrooms. The event is deeply rooted in history. It’s about remembering and relearning the significance of Halloween.

Baba Moudou Baqui founded Per Ankh in the heart of Detroit. He studied under Kilindi Iyi (one of the great pioneers in high-dose psilocybin exploration), and Moudou’s church is offering something rare: a research and lab space for classes, sacramental DMT, psychedelic mushrooms to members, and most importantly, a safe environment for people to receive these sacraments.

“We haven’t seen a lot of places that do that,” Moudou said. “We really know this realm.”

Per Ankh shares its faith with Zide Door Church in Oakland (130,000 members) under the umbrella of the Church of Ambrosia, which I founded. We’re brothers of the faith, united in the belief that all humans have a right to directly access the divine through the sacrament. What we’re doing isn’t new. Instead, we’re restoring what was suppressed. We’re remembering what was forgotten. We’re providing access to the same spiritual wisdom that has guided humanity for over 2.5 million years.

So when your kids dress up and go trick-or-treating, they’re participating in something older than they know. That is to say, Per Ankh, on Halloween night, is engaging in practices deeply rooted in our ancestry. Let me explain.

The Thread Goes Back Over 50,000 Years

Humans have always been different from other animals in one specific way: we bury our dead with intention. We don’t just put them in the ground. We create elaborate ceremonies. During the Upper Paleolithic Period, approximately 50,000 years ago, people buried their dead, often adorned with artifacts. One gravesite had twelve fox teeth on the forehead, twenty-five mammoth ivory arm bands, and a stone pendant. Another had thousands of mammoth ivory beads, each of which required hours to create.

Why spend hundreds of hours making beads for dead people unless you absolutely believed they were going on a journey in the afterlife? Humans used red ochre on their bodies, giving them the color of blood and life for their journeys. This ancient pattern occurred virtually everywhere, including Africa, Europe, and Asia. It’s hardwired in humankind. We want to mark these transitions. We need rituals.

At the Church of Ambrosia, we recognize this as the oldest foundation of all religions. Our ancestors didn’t learn about the afterlife from books. They experienced it directly through sacred plants. At places like Newgrange in Ireland (built 3200 BCE), there’s rock art with spiral patterns that look exactly like what becomes visible during altered states of consciousness. In my own experience with breakthrough doses, those geometric patterns are absolutely real. Were our ancestors documenting what they actually saw? I believe so.

The Greeks Knew: The Eleusinian Mysteries

Fast forward to ancient Greece and the Eleusinian Mysteries. These ceremonies were performed for almost 2,000 years. Everyone participated, from slaves to emperors. Demand for secrecy was absolute. The penalty for revealing ceremonial details was execution. But we know they drank kykeon, had profound experiences about death and the afterlife, and ultimately lost their fear of dying.

Cicero wrote that the mysteries gave him “a reason not only to live with joy, but also to die with better hope.” Plutarch recognized himself as an immortal soul after initiation. These weren’t ideas from a lecture. Something experiential was imprinted within each man.

The kykeon’s official recipe is barley, water, and pennyroyal. But in 1978, researchers including Albert Hofmann (who discovered LSD) proposed the barley had ergot growing on it. Ergot contains LSA, chemically related to LSD. Then, in Spain, at a temple to the Greek goddesses Demeter and Persephone, they found actual ergot remains. They also found it in the teeth of a 25-year-old man. This was direct physical evidence of ergot being consumed in a ritual context.

This aligns with what the Church of Ambrosia teaches: You don’t lose your fear of death by drinking mint water. Something real happened to these ancients, and it remains accessible today through direct experience at the church.

Samhain: The Celtic Ancestor Night

The Celts called their festival Samhain (pronounced “sow-in”), meaning “summer’s end.” October 31st to November 1st. This wasn’t just a harvest party. This was when the boundary between our world and the otherworld got thin. Really thin. The dead could come back, not only as friendly ancestors, but as other beings, too.

So they lit huge bonfires on hilltops as beacons for souls trying to find their way home. They set places at the table for deceased family members. The finest food and drink were offered. Doors and windows were left open. Candles flickering in windows were guides. The living wore disguises to confuse and ward off harmful spirits. This evolved into today’s house-to-house parade of children in costume, performing for food and drink. That’s trick-or-treating.

The druids believed in the immortality of the soul and reincarnation. Julius Caesar noted this made Celtic warriors extraordinarily brave. They weren’t afraid of death. Sound familiar? This is what happens when you have direct experience instead of mere belief.

The Mushroom Connection

Here’s perhaps the most important ceremonial element: Liberty cap mushrooms (Psilocybe semilanceata), which are harvested in late October in Ireland, Scotland, and Northern Europe, during the Samhain festival. The fungi appear in sheep and cattle pastures, exactly where Celtic pastoral people spent their entire lives. The timing is perfect.

Classical writers never mention psychoactive mushrooms, but the druids kept their knowledge extremely secret (twenty years of training, nothing written down). In shamanic traditions globally, sacred plants have been used to communicate with the dead. Always. Ayahuasca literally means “vine of the souls.” The Aztecs called psilocybin mushrooms teonanácatl, “flesh of the gods,” and used them for ancestor ceremonies. Polynesians used kava to contact deceased relatives. The pattern emerges everywhere.

Fly agaric mushrooms (red and white) appear in autumn and show up constantly in Celtic folklore about fairy rings and otherworldly journeys. Cultural memories of something that actually happened?

It is no coincidence that the season when the veil is thinnest is precisely when these consciousness-altering fungi appear in the pastures. At the Church of Ambrosia, we claim that mushrooms have taught us how to speak about God, souls, and art. These first experiences shaped us as humans and laid the groundwork for the first religion. We are part of that continuum.

What Got Lost and What’s Coming Back

The Christian Church eventually Christianized Samhain. Pope Gregory III moved All Saints’ Day to November 1st (731-741 CE), directly overlapping the Celtic festival of Samhain. The next day became All Souls’ Day. But folk practices survived. The bonfires continued. The disguises continued. When the Irish came to America during the Great Famine (1840s), they brought these traditions. In the New World, where encountering abundant pumpkins (way easier to carve than turnips) became a common practice, these traditions evolved into the Halloween we know today.

But something was lost. The direct experience. The actual communication with ancestors. The use of sacred plants to walk through the spiritual doorway. That’s what we’re restoring.

What We Do Differently

The difference between mainstream religion and what we do at the Church of Ambrosia is simple: We don’t ask you to believe anything. We invite you to experience it directly. When you sit with the Golden Teachers (that’s what we call certain psilocybin mushrooms), you don’t read about God in a book. You experience the divine firsthand. You communicate with your own soul.

And you get the answers to paramount questions: Why you came here. What you’re meant to do in life. Why did you have to go through life’s challenges? These aren’t abstract theological questions. They’re direct revelations through ceremonial communion with sacred plants.

Think of psychedelics as shaking the barrier between this world and the next. At a microdose, it’s like putting a crack in the wall. At a normal dose, it’s like poking a hole in the wall. At breakthrough doses, it’s like taking a sledgehammer and knocking down that wall entirely.

We see the sacraments as tools put there by God when God became everything. These sacraments were placed here for us to pursue this reconnection. Not medicines (though they heal). Not recreational substances (though they bring joy). We see tools that allow us to connect directly with our souls.

What Per Ankh Is Doing

Per Ankh is committed to providing safe access to psilocybin and DMT sacraments as a means of encouraging individuals in fundamental ways. Political education. Supporting the right to vote. Opportunities to nurture spirituality.

“This is about people reclaiming power over their own lives and recognizing their immense power to do so,” Moudou explained. “We have to motivate society from the inside out.”

This Halloween, the church is nurturing the kind of community our ancestors had when they gathered around Samhain fires, when they broke bread with the dead, when they opened themselves to wisdom from the other side. There is no hiding in the shadows and no insistence on secrecy as in the Eleusinian Mysteries (though we respect that tradition). The approach is open and focused on serving the community. It provides education, avoids harm, offers spiritual guidance, and, most importantly, offers access to these sacred teachers in a safe, ceremonial context.

What This Means for You

Bottom line: Although Halloween tends to evoke images of lighthearted fun, consider this year that you are a participant in humanity’s longest-running spiritual practice. When kids dress up, they’re participating in ancient shamanic transformation rituals. When you tell ghost stories, you’re maintaining oral traditions older than writing itself.

We’re all going to die. Halloween provides a sanctified approach to that knowledge through celebration, rather than fear; acceptance instead of denial; and community, rather than isolation.

When you understand that direct connection to higher consciousness isn’t merely possible but is our birthright, everything changes. It changes how you perceive the world and how you interact with others. You recognize that we all come into this world for a reason. As fellow humans, we should help everyone live a dignified life. It’s not just about individual awakening. It’s about collective transformation.

This Halloween, when you light your jack-o’-lantern, remember that you’re standing in a tradition that dates back to before agriculture, before cities, and even before written language. And if you’re in Detroit on Halloween night, stop by Per Ankh (15764 Woodrow Wilson St). Dress in costume. Honor your ancestors. Maybe take a journey with the sacred teachers. Experience what your ancestors experienced when they gathered at Samhain fires and opened themselves to wisdom from beyond the veil.

Because the dead are still close. And the mushrooms are still fruiting in the fields, right on schedule, as they have been for millennia. The universe is offering the same gift it has always offered: a doorway to understanding, a path to wisdom, a way to lose our fear of death through direct experience of what lies beyond.

That’s what Halloween is and always has been about. And that’s what we’re doing at the Church of Ambrosia and Per Ankh. 

We’re not inventing something new. We’re restoring what has always been there.