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PS: Related reading for those who also believe the modern myth about Christmas being a warmed-over pagan feast. For yet more information about the mythical (and real) relationship between the Catholic faith and pagan antiquity, see Mary, Mother of the Son.
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“Halloween falls on October 31 because of a pope, and its observances are the result of medieval Catholic piety.”
All the more reason for Evangelicals and secular media to denounce it…
rofl!
So sad…so true
Like it or not, Halloween has pagan origins, and for this reason many Protestants (mainly the more puritanical ones) have long refused to celebrate it. Also, like it or not, these days, in popular culture, Halloween seems to be more about pumpkins, witches hats, ghosties etc. than the Catholic saints!
I suggest you read the article.
Something few people know – the Gunpowder Plot would have succeeded, if the plotters hadn’t decided to warn the few remaining Catholic Peers (members of the House of Lords) to stay away from Parliament that day. The Peers went straight to King James, and spilled the beans.
Spread the word – the oldest Parliament in the world was saved by Catholics!
Saved from Catholics by Catholics. Interesting.
Actually I read that the whole plot was a setup by Elizabeth’s government, sadly it worked
It’s too bad that so many Catholics have bought into the Puritan interpretation of Halloween. This has resulted, at least in my diocese, in some priests criticizing parishes which hold Halloween carnivals. The Puritans also claim that Christmas and Easter are really pagan holidays. There is an element of truth in this, in that the Church superimposed Christian observances on what had been pagan celebrations and permitted Christians to keep much of the pagan culture in accord with the Pauline principle, “Test everything; keep what’s good”. This is grace building on nature, something the Protestants don’t get at all since their fundamental theology considers human nature to be not just wounded but completely corrupted by original sin.
You were doing great until you dropped the term ‘Protestants’ in for Puritans. Puritans, of course, would reject this and any set of observances for various reasons, not all of which were bad. But not all Protestants would, or do, reject such things or seem them that way, hence the ability to find Halloween parties at protestant churches and see pumpkin sales outside some protestant church lawns.
Christmas and Easter are really pagan holidays. There is an element of truth in this, in that the Church superimposed Christian observances on what had been pagan celebrations
Not really. There was no pagan Roman or Greek celebration on 25 December or 6 January. The West pegged Christmas at 25 Dec. because it was nine months after the Incarnation on 25 March. And that date was chosen because of various reasons starting from the date of Passover.
Ditto, Easter, which was pegged with respect to Passover, without regard to any pagan festivals. Remember, at the time the Paschal Feast (and Christmas, and All Saints) were set, most Christians had no knowledge or interest in Saxon or Irish festivals. They lived in Egypt or Asia Minor or Italy.
Roman celebration of Saturnalia coincided with the Christmas season. Both festivities were and Christmas still is extended (12 days). It is not a matter of an exact date. And Easter was the name of a pagan fertility deity. As Christianity moved into Celtic and Germanic lands, it adopted elements from the paganism of these countries. There is nothing wrong with that. I believe it was Chesterton who said, “The Church did not just baptize pagans; it baptized paganism.”
Except in Latin the word is Pascha after the Hebrew and Greek terms for the Passover.
Also, the pagan feast of Sol Invictus was instituted by Aurelian after the Church had begun to codify the Feast of the Nativity on 25 December. Also, for the record, the Solstice moves backwards in the calendar so by the time you have the Gregorian reform the Solstice fell on St. Lucy’s Day and now is 13 days past and Christmas is celebrated on 7 January in Orthodox countries like Russia.
In fact, in all European languages descended from Latin, Easter is directly named after Passover: Italian Pasqua, French Pâques, Spanish Pascua; and of course in modern Greek, (transliterated) Pascha, just as in ancient times
Not all European languages.
I believe she wrote “all European languages descended from Latin.“
Not all – at least not Finnish or Hungarian.
I don’t mean to bead a dead horse but Will, she said “languages descended from Latin”. Finnish and Hungarian are not descended from Latin. Finnish and Hungarian aren’t even Indo-European languages (despite being spoken in Europe).
The ONLY modern languages descended from Latin are Portugese, Spanish, Italian, French, Rumanian, and a heavy influence on English via the Normans.
Other European languageas are Germanic, Slavic, Celtic, or “other” in origin and have absolutely no descent from Latin.
Some European languages (Finnish, Hungarian) are actually Asiatic in origin. And you’ve got a few (like Basque) that they have no idea where they came from.
What I meant, folks, is “Those European languages that are descended from Latin.” Which is precisely why I listed only Italian, French and Spanish as being descended from Latin, and didn’t list any others. I mentioned Greek separately. Please learn to read.
oops, oops, oops
Hsst! Will! Ask about why Catalan, Romanshe, and Piedmontese were left out of the list of Romance languages.
Because they are considered “dialects,” not languages.
Christmas season?
You mean Advent?
“Easter was the name of a pagan fertility deity. ”
No. The Venerable Bede (and no other historian) reported that the spring month “Eostur-monath” was, he was told, named after a goddess. The Christian celebration of Easter was named after its month. To say it was named after the goddess would be exactly like saying that Ascension Thursday is really a pagan holiday honoring Thor.
Notice also that Bede never claims the goddess was one of fertility. That addition is from the overheated brains of those who wish to find pagan sex underlying everything Christian.
Further, no such goddess is ever mentioned anywhere: not in the Eddas, not in other ancient English literature, nowhere. The writers of the OED invented the name “Ostara” as the supposed etymological source of “Eostur-monath”; note that, in the OED, it has an asterisk, denoting no known occurrences of the word. Nobody since the OED editors has ever bothered with the asterisk.
It seems very likely that Bede was simply wrong, and/or badly informed, and that there was never such a pagan goddess. Even if there were, however, there isn’t the slightest case to be made that any celebrations in her honor were still around when Christians in England began celebrating Easter.
Kirk I suggest you go back and read Mark’s post on Christmas here, – Everybody knows that Christmas is really just a warmed-over Celebration of the Feast of the Sol Invictus
an eye opener and debunks any suggestion of Protestants/Puritans getting it partially right.
Believe it or not, “Halloween” as we know it was almost unknown in Ireland until fairly recently. When I was a kid, NONE of my relatives in Ireland followed ANY kind of Halloween traditions, pagan OR Christian. All Saints’ Day was a holy day of obligation, so everyone went to Mass… but there WEREN’T any other Halloween rituals that anybody in Ireland took seriously.
Today, of course, it’s diffferent. Modern Irish kids DO put on costumes and go trick or treating, because they learned about that tradition from American pop culture! In other words, Irish kids had to learn about this supposedly “ancient Irish tradition” from Americans!
Now, long ago, there WAS an Irish tradition that sort of resembled trick or treating… but it didn’t happen at Halloween time. On St. Stephen’s Day, the day after Christmas (what some call “Boxing Day”), Irish kids would go out into a field, kill a small bird, then take the dead bird from door to door and collect money from neighbors, supposedly to pay for the bird’s funeral. Some say the kids would actually spend the oney on candy, but surely fine young Irish lads would NEVER do such a thing!
THAT tradition has long since disappeared, though it was still common when my grandparents were little kids (between 1915 and 1925).
Thanks astorian. More evidence that junky American culture has swallowed the world and civilization lives in its belly.
Astorian, whenever I’ve written about Halloween on my blog, I’ve pointed out that not only is trick-or-treating not some ancient Celtic tradition, but it also didn’t even get started here in America until sometime between the 1920s and the 1940s, and it really “took off” as a custom after the end of World War II.
I had a grandfather who worked in the candy business (he was an inventor for Brach’s), and I recall hearing from my mom that during the war, any candy that could be shipped to the front (e.g., candy that didn’t melt easily, such as hard candies) was produced and sent there, while sugar rationing made domestic candy production slow down. I have often wondered if Halloween as a “go door-to-door and get candy” holiday didn’t take off after WWII precisely because all these candy factories that had been producing goods for the soldiers suddenly lost their captive market, so to speak, and needed a reason to keep selling the greater quantities of candy they’d learned to produce.
Whatever the case may be, I’ve learned that as a Catholic blogger any failure to support neighborhood trick-or-treating, gory costumes based on slasher films, and the assorted American cultural paraphernalia gets you labeled as some kind of weirdo purist who wants her kids to dress up like saints or something. It’s honestly as though Catholics in America have decided that a very American secular materialist custom is so important to the holiday that you can’t celebrate the holy day without the secular materialist custom, which, considering the exactly opposite fights we have over Christmas, strikes me as exceedingly weird.
Sorry, Dave. I did not mean to imply that all Protestants are anti-Halloween and I doubt that contemporary Protestants all take the view of total corruption of human nature caused by original sin. Indeed the more modernist may regard original sin as merely a symbolic concept. But total corruption of human nature was the initial theology of Luther and Calvin and the basis of the Protestant revolt and a lot of that carries over into America today and has in some ways leaked into American Catholic Christianity (less so in other countries). This mentality equates pagan with evil rather than merely with pre-Christian. The Catholic Church has always seen much good in paganism and has adopted it and improved upon it. What would our theology be without the philosophy of the ancient Greek pagans?
I’ve never been too concerned with the origins of Halloween, which struck me as a more of an academic interest. But one of my favorite protestant bloggers, Lydia McGrew, makes a point with which I agree: when we were growing up, Halloween was mostly silly “Boo!” stuff, but now people (grown adults specifically) are deliberately ratcheting up the satanic, occult, and gorey stuff to maximum. As I put it, Halloween has become a sort of day-long License to Disturb Thy Neighbor.
Incidentally, who was it that first said, “Guy Fawkes was the only man who ever entered Parliament with good intentions?”
You mean Jack Chick LIED to me?! Impossible!
In its incarnation as Halloween, it may well be a relatively modern phenomenon, but the notion that Christianity created its own festivals independent of older pagan meanings is a ludicrous bit of revisionism. Many cultures in the Northern Hemisphere have been honoring their dead and final harvests on or about Oct. 31 for many many centuries before Christianity came along.
Likewise with the winter solstice, which has no plausible connection whatsoever with any realistic date for the events described in the New Testament. Many of the early missionaries and church fathers wrote quite frankly about the tactic of converting pagans to the new religion by overlaying Christian celebrations and themes with existing ones. With Christmas at least, Christianity came up with a new meaning “birth of the Son vs rebirth of the sun.” In the case of Samhain/Halloween, they simply tacked a cardboard sign over the tradition saying “now doing business as All Souls Day.”
You really should read the article.
Don’t you get it, Mark? All Saints Chapel was built purely to provide an excuse to usurp Samhain! That dastardly Gregory III !
I did. D’Ambrosio makes a reasonable case that Christian appropriation of the day has had a tangible influence on the development of the contemporary Halloween customs. It’s reasonable (if a little obvious) to state that the traditions of post-Roman Christian Europe would have a more discernible influence on modern traditions than would the traditions of earlier pagan cultures which largely left little written records and whose religion was systematically suppressed for centuries.
That still falls well short of demonstrating that Halloween is “of Christian origin.” By way of analogy, we could show that Isaac Newton made some big and very visible contributions to modern mathematics. At the same time it would be far overstretching things to say that all higher mathematics was a 17th Century contrivance.
The provenance of the details and flavor of modern Halloween are open to debate, but its clear that it has much older and deeper root stock than Pope Gregory’s actions. People had been marking and honoring their ancestors and harvests for a long long time before that.
In addition, there is nothing in scripture or anywhere else that I am aware of that shows Oct. 31/Nov. 1 to have any scriptural basis or organic or independent meaning in Christian mythology or tradition apart from the conversion of Western Europe.
I have no problem giving credit where it is due, but the notion that Halloween is an original and organic Christian holiday doesn’t wash. If it truly had unassailable and ancient origins in Christianity, we would not find the deep ambivalence and discomfort with Halloween that we find among large swaths of modern Christianity and Catholicism.
“People had been marking and honoring their ancestors and harvests for a long long time before that.”
Sure. And that’s hardly unique to Europe. You find it throughout Asia and the Americas. That being said…
The modern take you’ll read on Halloween 99% of the time is that it is a Christianized version of the Celtic festival of Samhain. The problem with that history lesson is that there is absolutely no evidence for it whatsoever.
The evidence we do have tends to point to the idea that Halloween can be thought of as an Americanized version of late 19th Century Scotch-Irish traditions which were revivals of medieval Hallowmas traditions which in turn were Christian adaptations of Samhain.
I would agree that Halloween is not Samhain. Even the Samhain which I will celebrate in a few hours time is not the same in all respects as the ancient Celts. On the other hand, the pagan “DNA” of Halloween is plainly evident. Even though its practiced in a folkloric tongue-in-cheek playful way, the holiday is shot through with themes of spirit propitiation, guising and divination. None of those things are modern in origin and none of them are the least bit Christian.
It’s probably the most accurate to say that Halloween is neither Pagan nor Christian but secular. I read that some 161 million Americans are observing Halloween this year. That’s several decimal places higher than the number of us observing Samhain proper and far in excess of the number of Catholics who even know about All Souls Day let alone hold solemn observance.
Your “divination” comment makes me think it would be interesting to investigate whether Spiritism and its relatives had any role in shaping modern Halloween.
Kenneth, it’s pretty clear that the “deep ambivalence and discomfort” comes far more from the modern, secular manifestations of Halloween than from its origin, whatever it is. Concerns about its supposedly pagan nature arise *from* this *secondarily*, primed by the largely Protestant paranoia over pagan contamination supposedly condoned/abetted by the Catholic Church.
You really should read more. Especially about what you think you know about the Feast of the Nativity. Because your comment drips with ignorance.
I don’t know about any of this other stuff…the article seemed pretty plausible to me. I’m even going to share it with my kids.
As far as Easter, it runs along the Hebrew calendar and its relation to Passover, which is why it’s never on the same day year to year. Whether it coincides with some pagan celebration or not seems to be a stretch. Whatever, who cares? These are our celebrations, why must we disect them? I for one will be glad all of the secular-paganistic Hollywood/Halloween crap will be over with by 9pm!
Thanks for the links and article on pseudo-knowledge, Mark. The first person to tell me about the occult danger of Halloween, had obtained all her information from a video someone lent her. It’s funny how the some people who reject the authority of the Magisterium on the principle of “questioning authority,” will take as authority all sorts of unsubstantiated claims, as long as they are conveyed via a “screen.”
+J.M.J+
One such Evangelical “authority” on the alleged evil of Halloween is Mike Warnke, an Evangelical comedian who claimed to have been a satanic high priest before his conversion. He recorded a (spoken) album back in 1979 called “A Christian Perspective on Halloween,” where he claimed that it was a major religious holiday for satanists which Christians should never celebrate in any way, shape or form. This was influential in turning many Evangelicals against the holiday; the practice of churches holding a “harvest festival” instead of a Halloween party is actually based on a direct suggestion he makes in the recording!
A 1992 expose in Cornerstone Magazine, however, showed that Warkne never was a satanic high priest and that many other aspects of his testimony were false or exaggerated. Which calls into question his condemnation of Halloween, since his claim to have been a former satanist lent a certain weight to the “damning” statements he made about the holiday on the record.
More than a few Catholic bishops are less than thrilled with Halloween and take pains to distinguish it from the Church’s own holy day around that time:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1224079/Halloween-dangerous-says-Pope-slams-anti-Christian-festival.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/spain/6446630/Spanish-bishops-warn-against-anti-Christian-Halloween.html
No surprise, given that American Halloween is arriving in Europe in its most superficial, commercialized gore-fest form.
+J.M.J+
The headline of the first article says that the Pope has condemned Halloween, but the text of the article never quotes him to that effect, just L’Osservatore Romano and some other clergy. Yet another instance of the news media believing that every statement that comes from someone in the Vatican comes from the Pope?
Here’s an interesting quote:
“But in an article entitled The Dangerous Messages of Halloween, the Vatican’s official newspaper L’Osservatore Romano quoted liturgical expert Joan Maria Canals as saying: ‘Halloween has an undercurrent of occultism and is absolutely anti-Christian.’
“Father Canals urged parents ‘to be aware of this and try to direct the meaning of the feast towards wholesomeness and beauty rather than terror, fear and death’. ”
The holiday itself is apparently not terribly “anti-Christian” that its meaning can’t be directed “towards wholesomeness and beauty.” I wonder if they translated the priest’s words properly. Maybe he was saying that the occult trappings of its celebration are anti-Christian, not the holiday itself.
Why should we be surprised or shocked that more than one culture and/or religion in the Northern Hemisphere came up with the idea of commemorating the dead and/or trying to appease the spirits of the dead, or death itself, in the late autumn when everything in nature appears to be dying? Wouldn’t it be a natural thing to contemplate, especially way back in the days when not being prepared for winter really could mean death from starvation, disease, or cold?
Well, another Halloween has come and gone and as usual I missed out on all the occult Satanic terrifying parts. Over the weekend and Monday, I went to my parish carnival, to two costume dance parties, and handed out candy to kids who came to my door. I saw well over a hundred people in costumes and many others, all enjoying themselves and having an innocent good time. In addition, my parish elementary school raised money from the carnival. What was the experience of other commentators? Did anyone encounter any Satanic occultism? (Little girls dressed as witches doesn’t count.)
+J.M.J+
Not really. I saw a few horrible costumes on some of the older trick-or-treaters (seriously, why are teenagers still trick-or-treating? I stopped when I was 12) but nothing heavily occult or satanic. Then again, I don’t attend adult Halloween parties where they might break out a ouija board.
How I wish a parish around here would have a carnival or All Saints Day party, something like that. I only saw a “Harvest Party” at the local Baptist church, but didn’t attend. I took my son trick-or-treating dressed as Curious George. He had a good time. We bought a pumpkin and carved it, using a prayer similar to the one Mark posted and then removed a few weeks ago. Only the jack-o-lantern has traditional features (triangular eyes and nose, toothy mouth), no crosses or ICHTHUS or “bibles” carved into it. It’s just a jack-o-lantern, after all, not an ersatz sacramental.
We put the light in it, set it outside and waited for trick-or-treaters. The bell rang only twice. They tend to go to stores nowadays more than houses, I guess out of fear of child abductors/molesters. Another change from when I was little.
All in all, it was a good day here. Not a bit evil.
My memories of growing up during the *early* 1960s were that Hallowe’en was strictly a holiday for little kids. On the rare occasions when youngsters in costumes who stood more than an inch or two over five-feet-tall came to the door for treats, the parents and children answering the door would be embarassed for them. “Aren’t you getting a little old for this?” and “Isn’t it time you put that away, son?” the parents would sometimes ask. Because, unlike today, there were fairly well-defined parameters about what was considered appropriate behavior for young childrens, vs. for adolescents, vs. for adults, it was considered shameful for pre-teens and teenagers to behave as if they were small children, and shameful for adults to behave as if they were teenagers. And, unlike today, adults felt free to say just what they thought (within reason) to other peoples’ youngsters. (The era of “how dare you damage my precious angel’s self-esteem?” lay in the future.)
For mainstream, middle-class families Hallowe’en was bobbing for apples and costume parades during lunch hour, plates of home-made gingerbread and bowls of candy corn that the room mothers brought in to school, and at home, a dining room decorated with black-and-orange crepe paper streamers and silly paper decorations of skeletons and bats and witches on brooms (looking like “the Wicked Witch of the West”), and the fun of going door to door for treats. Most people had less disposable income back then – costumes, decorations, and goodies represented a fairly significant outlay, and were generally simple, cheap if store-bought, or, if possible, homemade. And families laid away all non-consumables were for next year, when it was expected that the costume of this year’s fourth grader might be worn by next year’s third grader, and that the bunny costume worn by this year’s eighteen-month-old might be be tried next year on the baby Mom was expecting as of this Hallowe’en. (Because in those days, families tended to have lots of kids.)
*Respectable* teens and twenty-somethings – the ones with actual *lives* – wouldn’t have been caught dead acknowledging Hallowe’en, any more than todays teens and twenty-somethings would be caught watching a full episode of Sesame Street or arranging to hold their birthday party at “Ranger Rick’s Petting Zoo.” Although some of the teen girls who really loved children might take door duty at home to supply the treats and fuss over our costumes.
There were monster and vampire and witch costumes worn by the children, but they were always done as a childrens’ cartoon costumes, almost like a corporate logos: very stereotypically *silly* and *storybook* and innocent of any attempts at realistic teeth or gore, etc. My mother put my little 5-year-old brother into a “devil” costume. It sounds awful today, but she made the costume out of red nylon, using a sewing pattern for pajamas with a little hood , and she added a long red nylon tail stuffed with cotton batting. A toy pitchfork was found at the 5-and-dime. There were no other props or make-up. Only the most sensitive of the tiniest children would be in any way distressed or put off by these costumes, and even then, probably not if they’d had their snack and a nap right before taking in the sight of us. If anyone in the neighborhood put on costumes or used decorations that had connotations of anything really visually threatening – nightmare-world grisly, Satanic or paranormal, that would be considered in the poorest possible taste, and the neighbors would gossip about them until Easter and would generally fuss up a storm. “What is *wrong* with them?” would be among the more printable comments. “Don’t they know Hallowe’en is for little, little kids to have fun – not to scare them?” “What *creeps*!” “Stay away from them.”
+J.M.J+
As we approached puberty, I remember my peers having the attitude that trick-or-treating was “for little kids.” We were getting “too big” for that. Unfortunately, they often graduated to “bombing” on Halloween night (hitting each other with eggs and shaving cream); that was considered the teenage thing to do in lieu of trick-or-treating.
I went to the All Saints Day Mass attended by the parish elementary school and a number of the kids were dressed as various saints. The priest said in his sermon that Halloween pumpkins represented saints because the vices of their old nature had been removed (the insides of the pumpkin) and replaced by Christ (the candle) whose light shines forth in the world through the life of his saints (the eyes and smile of the pumpkin). He spoke as if this analogy was something he had heard of, not just something which had occurred to him. Has anyone ever heard of this before? This priest is from Vietnam and I don’t know if they even have any Halloween celebrations over there although obviously the Catholics celebrate the feast of All Saints.
+J.M.J+
It sounds a lot like the object lesson some Evangelicals draw from jack-o-lantern carving, as put forth in Christian children’s books like “My Happy Pumpkin” and “The Pumpkin Patch Parable.” It’s also included in various “pumpkin carving prayers”:
http://www.netdesignsandmore.com/pumpkin.html
http://www.bigbigforums.com/vent-whine/523348-christian-oriented-pumpkin-carving.html
http://www.christiancrafters.com/craft_jesus_lantern.html
Yes, maybe that’s where he picked it up, perhaps indirectly. I’ll have to ask him the next time I talk to him.
Thanks for the info.
I’m thoroughly amused at both the OP, and the article it pointed out. Mostly for simple assumptions made without fact-chcking.
I am what I guess could be loosely termed as a pagan, I don’t celebrate Halloween however, other than in the same tradition most Americans do, giving out candy to the neighbor kids. I do celebrate Samhuinn, but that ‘holiday’ actually falls on the evening of the first full moon after the Autumnal Equinox.. this year that will be November 10th.
I do believe however that there is truth in the statement “The victor writes the history books” and Father Thompson, from his post as a priest of the Catholic Faith, can say what he wants and be assured that there is plenty of Catholic documentation to support his claims. There are some clear inconsistencies between his article and some other generally accepted historical facts though. I don’t think he is ‘wrong’ just mis-educated.
Considering the non-Christian peoples had festivals for everything, all the time, it is highly unlikely that the Catholic celebrations don’t coincide with some of those festivities… and while I believe some of the Churches shuffling and creation of Holy Days were done specifically to subsume the pagan holidays, it was bound to happen regardless and I couldn’t say this one was done for that purpose.
He is right in at least one regard, Halloween is not some pagan trick to lure your children into worshiping the Devil. I know I wouldn’t want to lure your children into doing such a thing. I don’t even believe in Satan, so I am unlikely to be recruiting for him…
In fact, most of Father Thompson’s information concerning the formation of the modern Halloween is pretty much correct from what I can tell. He merely leaves out some facts, and omission is no the same as pure fabrication.
I tried to write this as impartially as I could, I realize writing it on this forum is just begging to be attacked for my personal beliefs, however, I am not knocking yours, and I’ll appreciate you confining any remarks to non-prejudicial ones.
Thanks for taking the time to ‘listen’