Halloween - Not Pagan.

Time for the annual "Halloween is not pagan" column.

Honoring the dead

So if it’s not from paganism, how does Halloween pick up the Day of the Dead vibe? Well, about a century and a half later, St. Odilo, the abbot of the powerful monastery at Cluny (way over in southern France — not Ireland), adds a celebration of All Souls on Nov. 2. Because Cluny is the coolest place in Europe at the time, the devotion spreads everywhere, resulting in back-to-back feasts for all those in heaven and purgatory.

What about those in hell? The tenderhearted but obviously superstitious Catholic Irish fretted that the damned might not take kindly to being left out. So it became customary to bang pots and pans on All Hallows Eve to mollify them. This is not something the Church was thrilled with, but the irrepressible Irish did it anyway.

Things go along in this vein in Ireland (and nowhere else) until the 14th and 15th centuries. At this point, the colossal death toll of the bubonic plague (half the population died) makes a rather large impression on the European psyche, and Catholics became pretty focused on the afterlife. The result was a big uptick in Masses on All Souls Day as well as great enthusiasm for artistic representations of the danse macabre, or “dance of death,” featuring the devil leading a daisy chain of people from every walk of life into the tomb.

Costumes and treats

On All Souls Day, not Halloween, the French would dress up in costume representing everybody from the pope and the king down to the fishmonger and have a fun time dancing. But it was the French, not the Irish, who did that.

So how did costumes become part of Halloween? Most likely it begins when the French and Irish started hanging out together and marrying each other in the 17th-century American colonies. Creepy Irish folk customs about mollifying the damned and creepy French masquerades went together like peanut butter and chocolate.

And the “trick or treat” bit? Well, it wasn’t only French and Irish Catholics who were routinely treated badly by their English Protestant neighbors. English Catholics got it in the neck, too, and the great high feast of politicized English anti-Catholicism fell within days of Halloween: Guy Fawkes Night.

Guy Fawkes was an English Catholic who, whether because of a real conspiracy on his part or from being set up by a British crown requiring a patsy to focus English patriotic hatred on a Catholic bogeyman, was executed in 1605 on the charge of trying to blow up Parliament. Ever since, the Brits have had a wonderful time on Nov. 5, lighting bonfires, running around on a chilly fall night, and partying. And for extra special fun, in England and America in the 18th century, Protestants would put on masks and visit local Catholic houses in the dead of night demanding beer and cakes for their celebration — or else. When they said “trick or treat!” they meant it.

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All things spooky

Happily, as time went on, the anti-Catholicism of the season diminished. But “trick or treat” stuck around and got amalgamated to Oct. 31, the day the Irish and French were partying anyway. So by the mid-1800s, a largely made-in-the-USA Halloween was a fixture of American culture. Meanwhile, even today, Halloween remains almost unknown in Europe, even in the countries where some of the customs originated. It’s about as ancient and pagan and mystical and druidic as “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

When it comes to the “pagan origins” of Halloween, it turns out there is nothing there. Halloween is a product of Christian culture — and mostly American Christian culture — through and through. Where it is most ancient, it is least pagan — and most deeply Catholic.

Spooky Catholic Halloween Stuff.

Back from the Dead Walk.

Because no one does "spooky" better, what with Purgatory, the Communion of Saints and exorcisms and the fact that the Catholic world view envisions the distances between the natural and the supernatural as being much, much thinner than alternative metaphysics.

Halloween is not pagan.

I explained something like this to my oldest daughter today, in response to her question about Halloween being from Celtic paganism.  Since I was going to All Saints Day Mass, it dawned on me that All Saints Day is not a Celtic innovation, and that Halloween is tied to All Saints Day, and so Halloween is not Celtic, albeit there is the interesting coincidence that there was a Celtic feast, called Samhain (pronounced "sam-win"), around the same time, which I suspect was tied to the Harvest moon, and not to the last Sunday in October.

It seemed to me that All Saints Day - November 1 - is a feast day on the Roman calendar, which means that it wouldn't have originated in Ireland, but in places further south.  So, that implied that Halloween, the evening before "all hallowed's day", i.e., "all saints day", wouldn't have been slapped on to co-opt Samhain, since the Italians would never have heard of it in the first place.  So, it just seems like an interesting coincidence that All Saints Day and Samhain

But, then, the last Sunday in October is "Reformation Day" for some Protestants, which in its own way is tied to All Saints Day and the dead by being Luther's protest against the practice of employing indulgences for souls in purgatory.  Did Luther select October 31, 1517 to nail his 95 thesis to the church door because of that connection?  I don't know, but it is interesting that Halloween, Samhain, and Reformation Day all have a connection to the remembrance of the dead in some way.

It seems that there is just something about October.

Without further ado, here is Father Augustine Thompson's explanation:

We’ve all heard the allegations. Halloween is a pagan rite dating back to some pre-Christian festival among the Celtic Druids that escaped Church suppression. Even today modern pagans and witches continue to celebrate this ancient festival. If you let your kids go trick-or-treating, they will be worshiping the devil and pagan gods.


Nothing could be further from the truth. The origins of Halloween are, in fact, very Christian and rather American. Halloween falls on October 31 because of a pope, and its observances are the result of medieval Catholic piety.

It’s true that the ancient Celts of Ireland and Britain celebrated a minor festival on Oct. 31 — as they did on the last day of most other months of the year. However, Halloween falls on the last day of October because the Feast of All Saints or "All Hallows" falls on Nov. 1. The feast in honor of all the saints in heaven used to be celebrated on May 13, but Pope Gregory III (d. 741) moved it to Nov. 1, the dedication day of All Saints Chapel in St. Peter’s at Rome. Later, in the 840s, Pope Gregory IV commanded that All Saints be observed everywhere. And so the holy day spread to Ireland. The day before was the feast’s evening vigil, "All Hallows Even" or "Hallowe’en." In those days, Halloween didn’t have any special significance for Christians or for long-dead Celtic pagans.

In 998, St. Odilo, the abbot of the powerful monastery of Cluny in Southern France, added a celebration on Nov. 2. This was a day of prayer for the souls of all the faithful departed. This feast, called All Souls Day, spread from France to the rest of Europe.

So now the Church had feasts for all those in heaven and all those in purgatory? What about those in the other place? It seems Irish Catholic peasants wondered about the unfortunate souls in hell. After all, if the souls in hell are left out when we celebrate those in heaven and purgatory, they might be unhappy enough to cause trouble. So it became customary to bang pots and pans on All Hallows Even to let the damned know they were not forgotten. Thus, in Ireland, at least, all the dead came to be remembered — even if the clergy were not terribly sympathetic to Halloween and never allowed All Damned Day into the Church calendar.

But that still isn’t our celebration of Halloween. Our traditions on this holiday centers around dressing up in fanciful costumes, which isn’t Irish at all. Rather, this custom arose in France during the 14th and 15th centuries. Late medieval Europe was hit by repeated outbreaks of the bubonic plague — the Black Death — and she lost about half her population. It is not surprising that Catholics became more concerned about the afterlife. More Masses were said on All Souls’ Day, and artistic representations were devised to remind everyone of their own mortality.

We know these representations as the "Dance Macabre" or "Dance of Death," which was commonly painted on the walls of cemeteries and shows the devil leading a daisy chain of people — popes, kings, ladies, knights, monks, peasants, lepers, etc. — into the tomb. Sometimes the dance was presented on All Souls’ Day itself as a living tableau with people dressed up in the garb of various states of life. But the French dressed up on All Souls, not Halloween; and the Irish, who had Halloween, did not dress up. How the two became mingled probably happened first in the British colonies of North America during the 1700s when Irish and French Catholics began to intermarry. The Irish focus on hell gave the French masquerades and even more macabre twist.

But, as every young ghoul knows, dressing up isn’t the point; the point is getting as many goodies as possible. Where on earth did "trick or treat" come in?

"Trick or treat" is perhaps the oddest and most American addition to Halloween, and is the unwilling contribution of English Catholics.

During the penal period of the 1500s to the 1700s in England, Catholics had no legal rights. They could not hold office and were subject to fines, jail and heavy taxes. It was a capital offense to say Mass, and hundreds of priests were martyred.

Occasionally, English Catholics resisted, sometimes foolishly. One of the most foolish acts of resistance was a plot to blow up the Protestant King James I and his Parliament with gunpowder. This was supposed to trigger a Catholic uprising against their oppressors. The ill-conceived Gunpowder Plot was foiled on Nov. 5, 1605, when the man guarding the gunpowder, a reckless convert named Guy Fawkes, was captured and arrested. He was hanged; the plot fizzled.

Nov. 5, Guy Fawkes’ Day, became a great celebration in England, and so it remains. During the penal periods, bands of revelers would put on masks and visit local Catholics in the dead of night, demanding beer and cakes for their celebration: trick or treat!

Guy Fawkes’ Day arrived in the American colonies with the first English settlers. But, buy the time of the American Revolution, old King James and Guy Fawkes had pretty much been forgotten. Trick or treat, though, was too much fun to give up, so eventually it moved to Oct. 31, the day of the Irish-French masquerade. And in America, trick or treat wasn’t limited to Catholics.

The mixture of various immigrant traditions we know as Halloween had become a fixture in the Unites States by the early 1800s. To this day, it remains unknown in Europe, even in the countries from which some of the customs originated.

Via Mark Shea.

Happy Halloween.

Cracked's list of 7 disturbing but true urban legends.

This one hit the red zone on my creep-o-meter:

57-year-old man living by himself in Japan began to notice small things amiss in his house -- objects wouldn't be where he'd left them. Food would disappear that he swore he didn't remember eating. He'd wake up to strange sounds in the middle of the night, but every time he'd go and check them out, the door would be locked, the windows tightly shut. Nobody was there.

Was he losing his mind? Being messed with by a shy poltergeist? To find out, he set up a series of spy cameras around his house. The next morning, he ran back the footage on the camera and that's when he saw it. A strange woman crawling out of a cupboard like it was the TV in The Ring. And if you think that's terrifying, imagine what happened inside his stomach when, at the end of the video, she crawled back into the cupboard. The one that was just a couple of feet away from where he was standing, watching the video.

Presumably in an effort to maintain bowel control, the man assumed the woman was a burglar who was only temporarily hiding in the cupboard, and had since left. He called the police, who pointed out that all the locks on his doors and windows were undisturbed. There was simply no evidence whatsoever that anybody had broken in -- in other words (cue dramatic strings) the woman had been in the house all along.

After a thorough search, the woman was found nervously huddled in a small cupboard. Apparently she had sneaked into the house and slept, ate and even took showers there for an entire year without being detected. Think of all the things you've done in your most private moments -- the things you thought nobody would ever see. Now imagine a homeless Japanese woman had been watching it all. Yeah. We'll let that one sink in for a moment.

Yuck!