When I was young, I imagined that Halloween was for children; it was all costumes, candy and imaginary play. The annual autumn holiday was an escape from reality, presenting an opportunity to live (for a few hours—at least) in another world, to pass through the veil of what is real and true, to wander in the surreal.
We would go block to block in our costumes, Trick or Treating with pillowcases slung over our shoulders, carrying the candies we took-in at nearly every door we called on.
We scoffed at the people who gave out little bibles, or tubes of toothpaste, apples and raisins, just as we scoffed at the kids who collected their treats in plastic pumpkins; we shunned those who wore plastic masks and store bought costumes, just as we shunned those who handed out home-made fare like popcorn-balls and prayer books…the sanctimonious folk who had convinced themselves that they were doing something good.
We would rather have nothing at all than those things, which quickly found their way into the trash; all those little boxes of raisins may as well have been poisoned as far as we were concerned, and those who parceled them out were marked as traitors to the common wheel.
With fondness I recall the drill we performed in the last hours of Halloween, searching through our candy-piles, looking for suspicious things: pins and needles and razor blades, open packages, torn wrapping and other worrisome signs.
We believed (because we were taught to believe) that there were people in the world who hated children and would do us harm through our candies if they could. We heard stories about the painful and even fatal consequences that might befall the overly trusting child.
I never found anything dangerous, never once in all those years, but the fear of those treacheries haunted us for real, and the stories that supported them were rooted in something real.
Know this:
All Hallow’s Eve is not all fun and games; it has a deeper meaning than what we were taught to believe; there is more to it than what we see in advertisements for party rooms and favors; the glamour you might see in shopping malls, in the movies or on TV…this night has a much longer history, one that has little to do with ghosts and goblins and friendly witches.
When we celebrate All Hallows Eve an ages-old-conflict returns to haunt us.
Among the many things it marks is the struggle between the Christian Church of Europe, and the “old time religion” of the pagans (paganus, pagani), who inherited their traditions from the hills they lived in, between the new-fangled customs of the urban church and the persistent traditions of their country-cousins, the villagers whom the Christians called villains, and the “old-ways” that continue—still lurking beneath the surface of Christianity’s sacred rites.
On the Christian calendar, Halloween is All Hallow’s Eve, a celebration of the honored dead, of all the saints who have gone to meet the maker, with special remembrance given to those who passed in the preceding year...and especially to the famous among the members of the believing community.
Their beliefs were shaped in large part by the apostle Paul, who was Saul of Tarsus, a well-educated man, a rabbi and a pharisee; the apostle spoke about life in the flesh as a burden, though a happy burden if lived as a servant of the gospel. He expresses his personal faith in the continuing life of the spirit, speaking of eternal life with Christ as a state of being that has been freed from the demands of the flesh. Paul imparts his certainty in his faith to the burgeoning Christian community teaching that blessedness and grace await us in the great beyond, in which we will experience our greatest joy…which of course means the death of the body as we transition to true life…this is something the apostle deeply desired, and end to hunger, pain, old age and the final victory over death, by embracing the end of the body for the inevitability that it is. Paul spoke as the pagans did, he spoke as someone who believed in the outcome absolutely, and was looking forward to it.[i]
The old-pagans traditions of west-central Europe provided fertile ground for Christian mythology and ideology to flourish. The two worlds did not collide, they became enmeshed, tightly interwoven with the Catholic and “universal” Church. In the old-world October 31st was a night for celebrating the dead, plain and simple; the Celtic people who occupied Ireland and the British Isles, as well as all of what we think of as Western Europe,[ii] they called it Samhaim;[iii] it is a celebrations of all the saints and all the sinners, of all the dead who passed from this world, but walk among us still…all-the-dead-all-together. Like Samhain, All Hallow’s Eve is an acknowledgment of the DEAD writ large, both good and bad, the famous and the infamous, the honored and the abhorred, including all of those who lived and died anonymously…who would otherwise be forgotten.
Christianity absorbed the Celtic traditions at the same period of time that their druids became priests; in modern times the holiday has largely been stripped from its affiliation with the Church. Halloween has become just another masquerade, a this-worldly celebration of personal fetishes with a special emphasis on the eerie, the dangerous and the macabre. On Halloween we lift-up what is frightening and weird, exposing extrinsically the absurdities every person hides within themselves for the fear of revealing them to the world…the holiday has been secularized and given over to consumerism and marketeers.
I was fourteen the last time I went Trick or Treating, and really, I was only chaperoning my younger brother at that time; I was not dressed up, but I took some candy nonetheless.
In that same year I remember the pastor at my church lamenting the popularity of the pagan festival. He was jaded by the fact that he had seen the cultural supremacy of his group wane within his lifetime, and he lamented the future he foresaw, which included the erosion of Christian hegemony. My pastor believed that the Christian feast should be honored above the secularized-pagan-fete (never mind its origins), he wanted his own tradition, Lutheranism, to the exclusion of anything else; he was an old-fashioned member of the church-militant, the real-kind-of-monster who would not hesitate to unleash horrors on the world simply because people disagreed with him about the meaning of his myths…he wanted an evangelical stamp on it.
There was no fun in that, there was no fun in him; that pastor was just an old man watching his tradition fade away, seeing his rituals usurped by those of another generation, by children who were less committed to the Church than he was when at their age…and by the commercialization of everything.
He was wrong though; it was not an usurpation he was experiencing, it was simply an erosion of interest in a social structure (the Church), that did little to support people or explain the troubles of day-to-day life; whereas, the celebration of Halloween provided people with some relief from life’s vicissitudes, with an escape from the cares of the world by allowing its participants to slip into a realm of fantasy together.
In the years that followed that conversation with my pastor, the number of children who go-out in costumes seeking candy on Halloween declined by 25%...so they say. The holiday is no longer considered safe or wholesome; its fantastical landscape has yielded to the real dangers of the real world…to adult fears that have been incubating in our culture since I myself was a child.
Much of the way in which people celebrate Halloween has slipped-off the ecclesiastical calendar altogether, ritual gatherings have gravitated to the weekend that precedes it…with adults in America spending billions to decorate and throw parties, so that they might recover a few hours of the glee they remembered (or imagined they experienced) in their childhood.
For me Halloween is just another day. I do not believe the dead walk with us; I have never seen a ghost, or any evidence of magic. As far as national holidays go this one is an anomaly…though I do like to recall my maternal grandmother, Audrey by name, because she was born on this day.
Happy birthday Audrey Alm, it has been one-hundred and sixteen years since you were born.
There are real horrors in the world; there is war in Europe, torture and murder in Ukraine; there is war in the so-called Holy Land, torture and murder and bombings in Israel and Palestine; there is political violence in America, and the perpetual threat of it coming from the fanatical-followers of a pumpkin colored demagogue who threatens to overturn the constitutional order of our republic, who harms everyone with his greed and incompetence…everyone’s children, everyone’s grandchildren, including all future generations of Americans and the entire world, who even threatens us all with civil war and nuclear fire if he does not have his way.
I do not require imaginary boogey-men: Freddy and Jason and Mike; they ain’t got nothing on ‘dem hate mongers, those gun toting cowards and sycophants who delight in spreading fear in the heart of America, blowing smoke and spewing lies, trumpeting alarm day and night.
Happy Halloween!
[ii]
The Celtic people, whom the Romans called the Gaul, occupied Belgium, France,
Holland, the low-lands of Spain, Switzerland and parts of Germany up to the
Danube and the Rhine, and had been living in the region for at least
one-thousand years before the rise of Rome.
[iv]
The Pagan Grimoire, https://www.pagangrimoire.com/samhain-halloween-history/
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