All Hallows Eve

 

Midnight has come and the great Christ Church bell

And many a lesser bell sound through the room;

And it is All Souls’ Night.

And two long glasses brimmed with muscatel

Bubble upon the table. A ghost may come;

For it is a ghost’s right,

His element is so fine

Being sharpened by his death,

To drink from the wine-breath

While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.

Halloween is coming. There is an annoying misconception, among both Christians and secularists, that Halloween is a pagan holiday.

It is “All Hallows Evening”—the evening of All Saints Day. It forms an important part of that celebration just as Christmas Eve is important to Easter, or New Year’s Eve to New Year’s, or Holy Saturday vigil to Easter.

The usual claim is that Halloween is the continuation of an old Celtic seasonal festival, Samhain. But All Saints’ Day is celebrated, and celebrated on roughly similar ways, throughout the Catholic world. Mexico’s “Day of the Dead” is one famous example. Are the Mexicans Celts?

The seasonal festival of Samhain was held on the same day. But our first references to Samhain are from Ireland in the 9th century, when that country was already well Christianized. For all we know, it never had any more pagan religious associations than our own modern harvest festival, Thanksgiving. Indeed, it would make more sense to see Thanksgiving than Halloween as a continuation of Samhain.

It is probably true that the feast is held when it is for the same reason Samhain was held when it was: because November 1 is halfway between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice. It therefore serves as a celestial marker for the end of autumn and the beginning of winter. As a point at which the dark half of the year abuts the light half (more or less), it represents symbolically the link between the visible world of the living and the invisible world of the dead. So it is a time when the living should remember the dead, and perhaps equally when the dead might remember the living.

The hostility towards Halloween among Christians probably comes from the Protestant prohibition against praying to the saints. As a result, All Saints’ Day would have been anathema to them. Any idea of contact with the dead was and is, to them, necromancy.

Halloween is really the first day of a three-day festival. All Saints’ Day proper is for the saints in heaven. November 2, the next day, is All Souls Day, for the souls in purgatory. There is a third place that souls might go. Halloween proper is when we hear from them.