My previous post said "Halloween is neither based on nor co-opted from an old Celtic festival of the dead (more on that to come in a future post)." Well, now's the time.
If you live here in he Unites States or up in Canada, you've likely been told that Halloween comes from an ancient autumnal event that is spelled Samhain and pronounced "Sow-en." You've probably heard it was so beloved by the pagans native to the British Isles that Christians were compelled to mold to it if they were to have any hope of converting them to Christianity.
And you've probably heard that after molding to Samhain, "the Church" undertook a sustained effort to suppress knowledge of it because "church leaders" feared letting people know "the truth."
The problem with that narrative is that it's bullshit. The fact it gets proclaimed as true in textbooks and documentaries, and by the likes of National Geographic and Wikipedia, does not make it true, and it's long past time for all of us who value truth and love history to push back hard, whether we are Christian or not.
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To be sure, it does appear there was an annual event called Samhain a couple thousand years back in what would later become Ireland and Northumbria. It also appears that Samhain was celebrated on or about the turning of October into November.
But the Celts who presumably celebrated it never wrote a thing about it. In fact, their priests and leaders, the Druids, famously refused to write anything down because they didn't want their beliefs to become "common property," and also because they feared that writing would weaken the mind's ability to remember.
The Druids disappeared shortly after the Roman Empire arrived in Britain in 43 A.D., and the earliest accounts of them were not penned until circa 700 A.D. by Christian monks on Lindisfarne. That was long after the British Isles became Christian, and the earliest writings we have that mention Samhain were not composed until more than a century after that.
Keep in mind too that the earliest writings about Samhain do not depict it as a festival of the dead. That claim was not made until 1890, when a 36-year-old folklorist named James George Frazer placed the idea in his book The Golden Bough, which in turn struck a nerve with the modern pagan movement.
It was not until the twentieth century that anyone imagined anything about some connection existing between Samhain and Halloween - a falsehood misconception that cropped up in the USA and found dry kindling amongst a certain strain of fundamentalists. The fire sparked by that falsehood misconception had a fairly easy time, spreading thanks to several cultural factors there's no reason to get into now.
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My previous post explained that Halloween is a final contraction of All Hallows' Eve, the day before All Hallows' Day. It also touched on the importance of the overnight hours bridging All Hallows' Eve and All Hallows' Day. Before I continue, I think it's important to reiterate that using those two days to memorialize Christian martyrs goes way, way back to the first centuries of the faith.
Given that the early church extended through Europe, the Middle East, large swaths of Africa, and even into Central Asia (remember, Thomas himself made it to India) and there were no phones, steamships, planes, trains, or automobiles, it goes without saying that communication was a challenge.
When it came to doctrines and essential matters, the church was remarkably adept at keeping a pulse across the domain and rooting out heresies by way of ecumenical councils. However, when it came to inessential things like the precise date on which to recognize a particular person or thing, there was significant latitude from region to region. Therefore, from early on, All Hallows' Day was marked at different dates depending on where you were.
The church in Edessa observed it on May 13th. Most Christians in the East did so on the first Sunday after Pentecost, and this remains the case throughout the Eastern Orthodox Church. Coptic Orthodoxy, however, observed it as part of their New Year's Feast of Nayrouz on September 11th, and continues to do so to this day.
The church in Ireland originally observed All Hallows' Day on - don't laugh, potheads - April 20th. That's important for this today's post because the decision was made in 835 A.D. for Western churches to observe All Hallows' Day on November 1st. The Irish church - which was at that time the only one that could have have had any inkling of Samhain - had nothing to do with the November 1st decision but merely went along with it when the word arrived from the Vatican 1,500 miles away.
The decision was made by Pope Gregory IV and given legal teeth throughout the Holy Roman Empire not by him but by King Louis the Pious, Charlemagne's son, who at Gregory's insistence mandated that November 1st become the holy day of obligation for honoring the saints. The thought of an Italian pope working with a Frankish king to force all of central and western Europe to appease a small, non-influential, relatively impoverished band of folks from offshore makes no sense to begin with - and makes even less sense when you consider that there is no record of that small, non-influential, relatively impoverished band of folks being drawn to November 1st anyway.
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Do some people, the Anton LaVeys and George Hodels of the world, go around doing occult things and getting too chummy with demons every time October 31st gets dark and bleeds into November 1st?
Of course they do. But they do that every day. There is nothing special about October 31st which makes it "theirs," so we should not let them get away with saying it is theirs. It's not. Why allow liars to co-opt our day for themselves?
Like I said in the prior post, there is nothing wrong with thinking about death, or thinking about what happens on the other side, or thinking about those who have already crossed over. If anything, there's something wrong with not thinking about it.
Frankly, I find it more than a little embarrassing when fellow Christians cower from such things, and more than a little insulting when they say we should not do anything we find scary. Sorry Allie Beth Stuckey, but I don't think the Jesus who "drove out all who sold" and declared "I have not come to bring peace, but a sword" is calling for his army to be disproportionately staffed by shrinking violets.
So when this Saturday night rolls around, hand out candy to the kids who knock at your door. Allow yourself to be happy if any of them are teens, for it's good to see them in search of candy rather than drugs. Remember that Halloween is a holiday designed to honor the good guys, not a dark day designed to honor the demonic.
And finally, do not be shy about correcting anyone who trots out the tired canard that Halloween springs from the druidic beliefs of Celtic people from pre-Roman Britain. A little truth never hurt anyone.
Happy Halloween. And while we're at it, Happy Hallowtide!
Note #1: Many thanks to Ana Munley, Joel Heschmeyer, Father Chris Alar, and all others who speak passionately about the real roots of Halloween.
Note #2: If you are interested, here's a good piece concerning how little we know about Samhain, and here is a chapter concerning the ancient church in Edessa that I mentioned earlier.
Note #3: The photo at the beginning of this post was taken in Graham County, North Carolina.
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