A Very Christian Halloween

The Pagan origins of Halloween are well documented. And largely wrong. Mouse investigates the history of spooky parties and the night of 30 October.

At every major Christian festival stories are told about how it was really a pagan holiday which Christians took over and re-sprayed as the faith grew across the Roman empire. Halloween has one of the most pervasive and pursuasive stories. Authoritative sources across the web tell us the simple tale of how the Celtic pagan festival of Samhaim was appropriated and ammended slightly to become All Hallows. According to Britannica:

Samhain, in ancient Celtic religion, one of the most important and sinister calendar festivals of the year. At Samhain, held on November 1, the world of the gods was believed to be made visible to humankind, and the gods played many tricks on their mortal worshippers; it was a time fraught with danger, charged with fear, and full of supernatural episodes.

Sacrifices and propitiations of every kind were thought to be vital, for without them the Celts believed they could not prevail over the perils of the season or counteract the activities of the deities. Samhain was an important precursor to Halloween.

The long history of linking Christian festivals to pagan ones has a mix of motives. Early stories were told by Victorian romantics who felt it was a positive to show the deeper historical roots of Christian traditions and that it lent them additional gravitas. Some reformers sought to discredit unbiblical festivities by tracing them back to paganism, with the added bonus of making their pre-reformation Catholic brethren appear superstitious and quasi-pagan. This combination has left poorly evidenced historical claims hanging in the air, which have been picked up with vigour by modern secular atheists happy to discredit Christianity entirely, suggesting it is all just a fiction invented to paper over pagan traditions.

So Mouse is glad to see historians investigating these claims and finding that almost none of them hold water. It is almost irresistible to link the ghosts and ghouls of a modern Halloween party to something pagan - it is just what we think a pagan festival might have involved. But the links are surprisingly hard to find.

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Let's start by looking at what we know about Samhaim.

Almost all pre-Christian North European cultures appear to have had some sort of festival around the start of November. It was a time when the harvest had been gathered and secured in the food stores for the winter. Men returned from hunting or fighting and organised their homes and affairs. Animals were slaughtered, salted and stored to be eaten through the winter. It was also an important time for tribal assemblies and gatherings, for leaders and rulers to resolve conflicts, assert their authority and offer their benevolence in feasting and gatherings. Pagan cultures would have a range of religious connotations to these events.

The Celts were peoples across much of Northern Europe. They are most well known in Ireland and Scotland, but at its height Celtic culture spread widely across northern, central and southern Europe. That said, it was not an entirely homogenous culture and there was no central authority. As a result, religious practices varied widely. While it is true to say that the festival of Samhaim was Celtic, therefore, it is more accurate to describe it as an Irish Celtic festival.

Professor Ronald Hutton has studied the beliefs of this period extensively and concluded:

Thus, there seems to be no doubt that the opening of November was the time of a major pagan festival which was celebrated, at the very least, in all those parts of the British Isles with a pastoral economy. At most, it may have been general among the ‘Celtic’ peoples. There is no evidence that it was connected with the dead, and no proof that it opened the year, but it was certainly a time when supernatural forces were especially to be guarded or propitiated; actives which took different forms in different regions.

In other words, we don't know very much about Samhaim at all. The word 'Samhaim' simply means November (or summer end literally). Since the Celts were not a literate society, our knowledge of their customs, beliefs and practices is fragmentary and should be treated with caution. When we hear claims of specific beliefs around Samhaim we should treat them with scepticism. Most are derived from writings in the 17th century and not on anything approaching contemporary evidence, so claims that 'the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead was believed to be thin at this time', of dressing up and wearing masks are, I'm afraid to say, speculation at best.

It does seem likely that feasting was taking place, conscious that the coming winter was a dark and frightening period, indeed one which often ushered in death, so festivities appear to have confronted this. Ronald Hutton again explains:

People reacted to this forbidding prospect [the coming of winter] in two different ways. One was to make it the festival of divination par excellence, in which humans most frequently tried to predict the future: and in pre-modern times the prediction most often sought was who would live through the winter. The other reaction was to mock darkness and fear, by singing songs about the spirits which personified it (in Wales, for example, the tail-less black sow and the White Lady), or dressing up as them: in other words, to confront boldly the terrors of the season now arriving.

However, it was unlikely to have been a festival of the dead, which where we find them appear to have happened in the Spring as people emerged from the winter and grieved for those who died during the winter months. Nicholas Rogers, a history professor at York University and author of Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night, “there is no hard evidence that Samhain was specifically devoted to the dead or to ancestor worship, despite claims to the contrary by some American folklorists.”

When we look at how, when and why the Christian churches celebrated All Hallows on 1 November, we have a much clearer paper trail to follow, since this began to be standardised in the 9th century, very much in the historical period.

It appears that since the very earliest recorded history of Christianity there were feasts and festivals dedicated to martyrs and the faithfully departed. The dates for these varied before Constantine. Following the conversion of the Roman empire more consistent dates began to be established. The story of how the date of 1 November became settled is long and complex, but it is clear that it had nothing to do with an Irish Celtic festival. In the 8th century, on 1st November, Pope Gregory III dedicated a chapel to all the saints in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Gregory IV then made the festival universal throughout the Church, and 1st November has subsequently become All Saints' Day for the western Church. This was standardised in the 12th and 13th centuries where other dates for the festival were more actively surpressed.

The crucial detail here is that this festival had previously been celebrated in April and was moved in the 8th century under the encouragement of Alcuin and Charlemagne based on the practice of the Frankish churches. Whatever the customs were of pagan Celts in Ireland, they were not a consideration for setting the date of 1 November for a Christian celebration of the martyrs and the faithfully departed.

Some have argued that the November date originates from Irish influences, but more recent scholarship appears to have won this argument. The November date is coincidental with Samhaim, which was not a festival of the dead anyhow.

We are left with the question of how and why the modern halloween has emerged, with dressing up as ghosts and ghouls, trick-or-treating, carving pumpkins and the like. These appear to have been Irish traditions imported to America during the 18th and 19th centuries where the practices caught people's imaginations and became attached to All Hallows Eve.

Mouse draws no conclusion on how Christians should respond to Halloween celebrations today. But we shouldn't be afraid that our kids are accidentally taking part in pagan festivities by putting a pumpkin outside their front door.