All Hallows Eve

It is common knowledge these days that Hallowe’en is a pagan festival.

No doubt it does have elements taken over from paganism; as do Christmas and Easter.

But it is also perfectly legitimate as a Christian holiday.

Hallowe’en is the evening of All Saint’s Day—“All Hallows.” It makes as much sense to mark it as a prelude to the day itself as to celebrate Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve, Good Friday, or Mardi Gras.

It has, it is true, overshadowed the day itself. This too is not so odd: the same is true of New Year’s Eve.

It is a pity that in Canada we do not properly celebrate All Saint’s Day, though. This is when we remember the souls in heaven, which is to say, the good people who have gone before us. In the Philippines, for example, a thoroughly Catholic country, the day is spent at the local cemetery, at the graves of ancestors. It is especially associated with family members who have died in infancy. If they have died after baptism and before the age of reason, they are known to be in heaven. Other saints are officially declared by the church; these are honoured on their own special days. On this day, we can make our own private assumptions about those we knew when alive, and knew to be good people.

This day, we commune with them—honour them, remember their lives, and ask for their intercession.

The next day, November 2, is All Souls’ Day. On this day, traditionally also spent at the cemetery, you pray for all, especially relatives, who are assumed to be still in purgatory. Those not so good; the general run of folk.

It is sad to me that in Canada departed relatives tend to be forgotten and their graves left unvisited.

But so far, we have accounted for only two possible fates for souls after death: heaven and purgatory. As every Catholic knows, there are really three. That’s where Hallowe’en comes in. Souls in hell do not belong, of course, on All Saints’; and there is no point in praying for them on All Souls, as they are already lost.

If Hallowe’en is not clearly identified as this, as All Damned Day, it is because the reality is too unpleasant to face so squarely. It is the sort of thing we prefer to cloak with a euphemism. In any case, it is appropriate to mark not the day, but the evening: day means good, and night means evil.

Why should we mark such a sorry thing? The damned are beyond helping or being helped.

Because, like Medieval murals showing the Dance of Death, it is a useful caution for the living.

Why the pagan elements? Because pagans, presumably, from the Christian perspective, are on the road to hell. The word “hell” itself is taken from a pagan word for the afterlife.

The event, like most such things, has been sanitized over time: just a bunch of little kids trying their hand at deceit and gluttony. Back in Irish Gananoque, where I grew up, Hallowe’en night still involved more. Older kids—teenagers—soaped up windows and performed other acts of mischief. The forces of chaos had been unleashed.

Why is Hallowe’en celebrated on the last day of October? The conventional explanation is that it is the old Celtic New Year; but that, if so, is incidental. There is a fairly narrow window in which a day of hell can fit into the liturgical calendar. Advent in November through to Pentecost in June or so is sacred time. And it must be soon before this, instead of soon after it, to convey salvation history.

October 31 falls close to the midpoint between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice. It can be seen, therefore, as the first night of winter, given the same logic that makes June 21, the summer solstice, “Midsummer Night”; and Groundhog Day the first day of spring.

Winter is the season of cold; but, more important in celestial, which is to say, metaphorically, heavenly, terms, it is the season of darkness. Hence, October 31 roughly marks the moment when darkness becomes triumphant over creation. Christmas is the rebirth of light, at the winter solstice; Easter, at the vernal equinox, marks light’s ascendancy.

Hallowe’en is therefore the anti-Easter; directly across the year from, six months before, Easter’s salvation.

You have to give the devil his due.