Happy Halloween

 

Halloween is here. Another round of culturally illiterate claims that it is based on the pagan Celtic feast of Samhain.

It is not. It is All Hallows Eve, part of a three-day Christian celebration in honour of departed souls; just as Christmas Eve is part of Christmas, and New Year’s Eve part of the New Year celebration. Next day is All Saints Day, and the day after All Souls Day. First a day to remember the souls in heaven, then a day to pray for the souls in purgatory.

There is no point in praying for souls in hell.

If it is all based on a pagan Celtic feast, why is it celebrated in Mexico, with no Celtic traditions to speak of, as the Day of the Dead? Why is it celebrated in the Philippines, as an evening you spend in the graveyard, burning a candle and holding a family picnic at the graves of your ancestors?

It is a reminder that the dead are still with us, and a memento mori, a reminder that for us too, this life on earth is temporary, not our final destination. And so the souls of the dead may wander the streets.

The claim that it is all Samhain is in part Black Legend, a survival of English anti-Catholicism, which wanted to portray anything Catholic as pagan. 

And it is in part an irrational fear of death.

Because we moderns are terrified of death and the afterlife, we have transferred the meaning of the festival to fear itself. Children now simply dress as scary monsters, and Hallowe’en is supposed to be scary. The real theme, death and the afterlife, is suppressed precisely because we find it too scary. We sublimate it by having children dress up as spooks, and give them candy and pretend to be scared, so we can pretend it is all make-believe.

Good people are not afraid of death; they do not whistle past graveyards. It is our conscience that makes Hallowe’en frightening to us. It implies judgement.

Memento Mori

Some classy Hallowe'en decor: Day of the Dead pillows.

On to Jerusalem!

This really appeals to me as a Hallowe'en costume: a crusading Knight Templar.

Megyn Kelly and Redface

Megyn Kelly is now in trouble, and has chosen to publicly apologize, for arguing on air that she saw nothing wrong with wearing blackface for Hallowe'en. Rumours are that she will be fired.

Here is another example of the clear and present danger to our democracy from arbitrary restrictions on speech. It is, surely, at a minimum perfectly reasonable to make such an argument. It must not be ruled intolerable without being addressed. Or we will never know whether it is wrong.

If it is intolerably racist for a European-American to dress as a black celebrity for Hallowe'en, is it then intolerable to dress as Mulan, because she is Chinese and your are not? Like Princess Jasmine, if you are not Middle Eastern? Like Santa Claus, then, if you are not Greek? Black dancers in New Orleans' Mardi Gras traditionally dress as American Indians. Are they being intolerably racist? Dutch Christmas festivities traditionally feature a blackface character, Black Pete. Is the Dutch nation so racist? 

I expect the response will be that blackface has a unique history of mocking and making fun of black culture. If true, this need not be obviously relevant to one's Hallowe'en blackface; it seems hypersensitive. But even this much is not obviously true, as this blog has pointed out in the past. The American tradition of minstrel shows in blackface can be at least as readily explained by a popular belief that black music and black musicianship was superior to white, as by any intent to mock blacks. Historially, minstrel shows were at least as popular among black as among white audiences. They were banned in much of the antebellum South as anti-slavery propaganda.

True, the minstrel shows featured comic characters, who appeared in blackface. But if you are going to put on a variety show, and the musicians are all blackface, and many of them also do comic routines, this is more or less inevitable, and would be awkward to avoid. To do so would seem instead to be deliberately saying something racist about either blacks or whites.

And when it comes to the tradition of comic characters on the stage, whiteface is far more common than blackface. The classic clown makeup demands both whiteface and red hair. Ethnically, whom does that suggest? Probably Irish folks, like Megyn Kelly. 

Why then are we not at least equally up in arms about this appalling racism towards historically oppressed northern Europeans? Why this black privilege?

Hallowe'en--Boo! It's Christian!

There seems to be a pervasive myth that Hallowe’en is a pagan celebration. It is supposed to be a survival of the old Celtic feast of Samhain.

It is probably not. It has a perfectly proper Christian pedigree. It is, as the name implies, the eve of All Hallows; that is, All Saints’ Day. And All Saints’ Day is itself quite ancient—as old as the Third Century AD. Which is to say, as old as Christmas. The current date has been observed since the eighth century—in Rome, making any connection with the old Celtic Samhain apparently purely coincidental. There are no Celts in Rome.

It is traditional to include the night before as part of a Christian feast: Christmas begins Christmas Eve, and Easter Sunday begins with the Easter Vigil. So with All Saints’. In the very early church, indeed, well before the Third Century, it was traditional, on the night before a martyr’s death anniversary, to go to his or her tomb and celebrate mass there on the preceding night.

Following the ancient practice, it is still traditional on this night throughout Catholic Europe to bring flowers to the tombs of one’s ancestors, and stay there overnight in vigil, in the pious hope that they, too, are now saints in heaven. This is also how it is still observed in the Philippines. Precious few Celts are involved.

It is therefore a “Night of the Dead.” All Saints’ is indeed known, in Mexico, as the “Day of the Dead.”

If children, then, dress up as corpses or mummies, they too have a right to expect some sort of reward. It is a natural way of including them, when they are too young to understand death or to remember the ancestors being honoured.

November 2, again, is All Souls’ Day—a day of prayer for all the souls in Purgatory. This too can have no relation to the pagan Samhain—the observance of November 2 as All Souls’ began at Cluny, in France. However, the tradition that a door opens on November 2, and that the souls in purgatory are able to communicate with the living through it, is associated with this feast since its beginnings. In the 11th century Life of St. Odilo, the origins of the celebration of All Souls’ are explained: a pilgrim returning from the Holy Land was shipwrecked on a deserted island. There, a hermit told him, there was a chasm through which the souls in purgatory could be heard to lament, requesting prayers, and demons could be heard complaining of how well the prayers of the monks of Cluny worked to rescue these lost souls.

In Tyrol, families leave out cakes on All Souls’ Night. They do so in Bolivia as well, and the souls in purgatory are understood to be somehow nourished by them.

It is a short step from all this to the idea that kids knocking on your door are to be given cakes as well, and that they represent the dead returning to our homes.

Here, some traditions of All Souls’ have probably simply been moved to the celebration of All Hallows—just as the traditions of St. Nicholas, whose feast day is early December, have been amalgamated with those of Christmas; as has the gift-giving of Epiphany.

Bad news: it’s a Christian feast.

I guess this will lead to its being banned in the schools. Bizarrely, so long as we think a tradition is pagan, and has to do with such things as devils, witches, self-mutilation, and human sacrifice, it is socially acceptable.

But a nativity scene? Unacceptable.