The Three Day Celebration of Halloween
Allhallowtide, Hallowtide, Allsaintstide, or the Hallowmas season is the Western Christian three days’ observation of 1) All Saints’ Eve (Halloween), 2) All Saints’ Day (All Hallows’), and 3) All Souls’ Day. In a previous blog post we wrote a short description of how these were traditionally celebrated.
Latin vs. American Ways
How is this solemn celebration (observed mainly in Latin countries) related to hosts of ghosts spooking around the world, witches, broomsticks and black cats in shop windows, children disguised as goblins engaging in practical jokes and adults trying to learn the future by means once forbidden to good Christians? Well, it is not. The American Halloween tradition that is spreading all over the world was adopted from pre-Christian Scottish and Irish folk customs.
Druid Celebrations in Honour of Samhain, Lord of the Dead. Sacrifices.
The earliest celebrations were held by the Druids in honour of Samhain, the lord of the dead on 1st November, which was also the Celtic New Year’s Day, the beginning of winter, a season in which darkness encroaches, and light retreats. Eerie rites were performed, and there was no spirit of fun.
The Druids worshipped many of the Greek and Roman gods as well as their own Sun God and Samhain, the lord of the dead. These two were celebrated on the same day, the 1st of November. The former, the ripener of grain, was thanked for the harvest, and the latter was welcomed to assemble the souls of the people who had died the previous year. Because of their sins they spent the year in the bodies of lower animals, but on New Year’s Eve their sins were expiated, and their souls were released to go to the Druid heaven.
Sacrifices were offered – both horses and humans. People were confined in cages of wicker, shaped as giants or animals. These were set afire by Druid priests, and people were roasted alive. These ceremonies were outlawed by the Romans after the conquest of Britain. For more details you can see our blog post we mentioned above (see the part titled “The Pagan Roots of Halloween”) and the works of National Geographic – a text and a documentary (a lot of gory scenes!).
Milder Halloween Adopted by Christianity.
Old rites were outlawed by the Romans and condemned by the Church. However, they survived for centuries in attenuated form. In Medieval Europe black cats were sacrificed in the way we just described. They were believed to be familiars of witches or transformed witches themselves. In Britain horses were sacrificed as late as 400 A.D. Christians consecrated and used former pagan temples, but oxen were sacrificed on the church altars, albeit in honor of the saints (as instructed by Pope Gregory the Great of the 6th century).
Christianity has incorporated some harmless pagan festivities in its calendar, so eventually it incorporated the attenuated feast of Samhain – transformed into a celebration of all saints – known and unknown. This was helped by the fact that the beginning of November in the popular mind was associated with the thronging of spirits.
Halloween Outside the Church. Fairy Folk and Witches.
Outside the church the belief in Halloween as a gathering time for unsanctified and sanctified spirits seems to have continued with little change. To the ghosts originally assembled by the Lord of the Dead were added goblins and fairies.
The fairy folk had their origins in the ancient pre-Celtic cult of the dead. The fairy host as it first appeared in Scottish and Irish legends was made up of beings different from the gauzy-winged midgets. These were larger and more beautiful than men – ghosts of ancient kings and heroes, mingled with elder gods. Their dwellings were the burial mounds of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. On Samhain feast they came to take a scornful look at the feeble folk who kept the land they once ruled. Stunned by the sound of church bells, shriveled by holy water, they dwindled to “little people” who still kept their dwelling places. Maeve, the warrior queen of Connacht, survived as the fragile Queen Mab of the English poets.
The festival was also associated with witchcraft. Long after the church triumphed over organized paganism, country people throughout Europe continued the ancient practice of placating local spirit and strengthening fertility by magical rites – both “black” and “white”. Parish priests tolerated such practices even if they did not approve of them, and villagers saw no conflict with Christianity.
In the later Middle Ages the church began to take a stronger stand against such pagan practices, and during the Reformation they were classed as heresy.
Witches vs. Church
As a result, witchcraft emerged as a more or less organized cult in opposition to the church. Much of its ritual was a travesty of Christian rites, supplemented by ancient beliefs and practices. Halloween became the great witch night when the Prince of Darkness and his cohorts of witches and warlocks gathered together to mock the church’s festival of All Saints by their own unholy revels. Their meeting places were the Brocken mountain in Germany, the Blocksberg in Sweden, the forest of Ardennes in France, and any old church, ruined abbey or megalithic monument in Great Britain.
On the eve of Samhain pagan Celts lit bonfires on hills to welcome the winter season and ward off evil spirits. In dwellings cooking fires were extinguished and new ones kindled in token of the new year.
The idea that ghosts and spirits fear fire was widespread, and with the rise of the witch cult fire became the favourite weapon against the powers of darkness. It seems that the burning of witches was perceived as a rite of purification rather than of punishment.
The peasants of Scotland and Ireland built fires on the hillsides. They plait their pitchforks with straw, set them on fire and waved them aloft to singe the brooms of any witches who may be hovering nearby. Scandinavian peasants performed similar rituals to drive the witches back to the Blocksberg, the mountain where the queen of the witches dwelled. In Austria, the witch night was May Eve, Walpurgis Night, April 30. The town of Benevento in Italy was supposed to be the scene of one of the Great Sabbaths held every seven years by Satan and his cohorts, so peasants of the region still remembered this and on Midsummer Eve (St. John’s Eve) they purged their land of witches. In Sannio, near Benevento people stored and dried timber for the occasion throughout winter. They made torches that were consecrated by the priest and on 23rd of June, after nightfall walked to the church on the hill top, blazing torches, singing. The flying witches were believed to be singed by these fires and made to fly away, so the village was purged for another year.
Halloween and the Beginning of Christian Reformation
In spite of its pagan accompaniments, Allhallows was retained at the time of Reformation in the calendars of the Church of England and of many Lutheran groups. Halloween had a special significance for Protestants since it was on that day in 1517 that Martin Luther posted his writings on the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, attacking the practice of selling indulgences. The Western Church (unlike the Eastern Churches) had a penitential system that required Christians to not just repent and confess but perform acts of penance, that is self-punishment. If these were not performed, the sin had to be expiated in purgatory (an idea that was never adopted by the Eastern Churches, in whose theology there is no purgatory after death). Thus people who could afford to pay the church would not need to perform penance in this world or the next. The Western Church sold indulgences to raise money to build churches, but the system was abused by greedy bishops and turned into a business venture. Luther chose Halloween night as he knew townsfolk and pilgrims would be going to the church that night. Luther’s writings were accepted with great enthusiasm and the selling of indulgences was abolished soon after. Other differences had arisen by then and the Reformation was under way in Western Europe. In the East the Church held to its earliest teachings as it does to this very day.
In the next publication we will summarize the chapter on All Souls’ Day.
This text is part of the Halloween Advent series. Here is the previous part.
Other publications we have written on Halloween:
How to Have a Meaningful Conscious Halloween: 3 Points to Consider