All Hallows’ Eve

Controversy continues to surround Halloween, with various voices denouncing or defending it as darkly pagan, harmlessly secular, liturgically Catholic, or historically anti-Catholic. And, interestingly, they are all right.

Halloween began as the Celtic festival of Samhain, the Lord of the dead in Celtic mythology. It was believed that on the night before the feast, the gates of the underworld were opened and that ghosts, demons, and witches were allowed to roam freely. In response to this otherworldly menace, the Celts followed the principle “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” and disguised themselves as various kinds of ghouls to escape harm. (From this practice comes our custom of Halloween masquerading). And in addition to blending in with the infernal, the Celts also tried to appease evil spirits by offering them food and wine.

Neopagans celebrating Samhain

The Catholic Takeover

After the Catholic faith came to Celtic lands, the old Druidic festival was associated with the night before All Saints’ Day and was thus called All Hallows’ Eve (a name that gives us the modern appellation of Halloween), even though the institution of All Saints’ Day on November 1 was a complete coincidence. Church officials were gradually able to wean the Celts from their sacrifices, replacing the food offerings to the gods with “soul cakes” that would be made on Halloween and offered to the poor in memory of the faithful departed. This was centuries before the Western Church instituted November 2 as All Souls’ Day, the day commemorating the souls suffering in Purgatory.

The original intention of distributing soul cakes was doubly charitable, ensuring that the poor would be fed on this day, in exchange for which they would pray for the donor’s dead.

Soul Cakes

But eventually, “souling,” as it was called, became more frolicsome as groups of young men and boys began going from house to house and demanding food, money, or ale instead of cakes. The Church, incidentally, also transformed the nature of masquerading during this time from the evasion of evil spirits to the emulation of Christian saints. Large processions in honor of all the saints were held in England and Ireland on the vigil of the feast, with participants either carrying relics or dressing up as angels and saints.

The Irish put an additional spin on the feast with their story about a deceased scamp named Jack. Jack had been kicked out of heaven because he was not good enough and out of hell because he kept playing tricks on the devil. It was thus arranged that Jack would roam the earth with only a lantern to guide him until the Last Judgment, when God would finally decide what to do with him. Hence the ubiquitous Halloween jack-o’-lantern, which in Ireland is made out of the potato and in America out of the more commodious pumpkin.

Jack O’Lantern Potato

Modern Changes

The Reformation all but eliminated Halloween, since most Protestant ecclesial communities removed the feast of All Saints from their calendar. In England, however, many of the old Catholic customs were transferred to Guy Fawkes Day six days later, the commemoration of a failed plot by several English Catholics to blow up Parliament on November 5, 1605. After the plot was foiled, the British government declared November 5 “a holiday for ever in... detestation of the Papists”, and it was illegal not to celebrate the feast in the United Kingdom until 1959. In the United Sates, the anniversary was known as Pope’s Day, and despite George Washington’s admonitions, it continued to be celebrated in some parts of the country well into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

George Washington: No Pope’s Day!

Of the customs that were transferred, the principal one concerns door-to-door begging. Instead of souling, boys in England and later America would solicit lumps of coal on the night before the holiday in order to burn effigies of Guy Fawkes or the pope (usually, Pope Paul V [1550-1621], who forbade English Catholics from taking the Oath of Allegiance to the Crown). After the Irish emigrated to the United States in the nineteenth century, bringing with them their old Halloween customs, the coal-begging of Guy Fawkes Day gradually elided back into the souling of October 31. It is from this combination of Irish Catholic and British anti-Catholic observances that our modern custom of trick-or-treating has emerged.

Burning an effigy of the Pope on Guy Fawkes Day, LIFE Magazine, 1945

What to Do

Halloween today can be celebrated in any number of ways, from innocent costumes and customs (such as bobbing for apples) to teenage vandalism to truly satanic cultic practices. It is because of this checkered past and present that many traditional Catholics prefer to host more explicitly religious events in addition to Halloween or not to observe the standard American Halloween at all. Adopting the old tradition of All Saints’ masquerading, they host costume parties in which children dress as Saints, and in which games and contests are held and prizes rewarded.

An All Saints’ Party at St. Peter Catholic Student Center in Waco, Texas. Three pirates are in the background. In the foreground are four Saints whose lives were forever changed by pirates. Can you guess who they are? [1]

Others infuse the old Christian meaning back into the holiday. Since it precedes the first class solemnity of All Saints’ Day, October 31 was once a day of fasting and abstinence. One family we know teaches their children to think of trick-or-treating as a kind of harvest gathering for the real holiday of All Saints’, and indeed for the entire first week of November. This not only keeps them from gorging themselves on their sweet plunder in a single night, it yokes their harmless fun to a deeper spiritual meaning. In former ages, All Saints’ Day was celebrated for eight days, and though this octave was removed from the calendar by the time of the 1962 Missal, paraliturgical traditions continue to thrive in connection with All Souls’ Day on November 2. Plenary indulgences, for example, are still offered from November 1 through 8 for visiting a cemetery and praying for the dead, and several Catholic cultures have long had special funereal foods and customs for this week. American Catholics of Western European descent have never had a robust “week of the dead” unlike, say, the Mexican people, and so saving Halloween candy for the saints and the poor souls in purgatory could be a way to fill this void and correct the abuses of Halloween to boot. One thing is certain: if the Church can snatch Halloween away from the Druids, she can take it back from secular America.

[1] From left to right: St. Symeon of Trier, St. Vincent de Paul, St. Flavia (in the scarlet robe), and St. Patrick.

The Smoke of Satan Enters From the West...at Our Invitation

How Halloween Corrupts Us and Why Ad Orientem Worship is the Antidote

I recently attended a baptism at St Elias Melkite church in Los Gatos, California. This was done on a Sunday morning immediately before the Divine Liturgy, and the whole community was encouraged to attend to welcome the new member into the Church and the parish.

At one point we all turned as directed by our pastor to the west, in order to renounce Satan loudly and to make the gesture of spitting on him. We then turned around and to the east, ad orientem. This was as much, it seemed to me, to turn our backs on Satan as to look for the Risen Christ. It was a powerful moment.

The power of actions and words to affect our hearts profoundly was made very strongly in the St Elias bulletin for that very Sunday, which reproduced a letter from Russian Orthodox Bishop Irenei of Sacramento to his flock, and was talking about something else also connected to the devil - Halloween.

In the letter, he is advising Christian not to participate in Halloween celebrations. At one point he says:

Where secular people may feel they have the option to divorce the spiritual realm from the physical and do one thing with their bodies while believing another in their minds, we Christian people do not. We know that the actions of our bodies, and the things we do with our lives, affect our hearts and are directly connected to spiritual realms of which we are, on account of our weakness, not always immediately aware. Can you honestly think—you who gaze at and touch the holy icons in your home and in our temples, and know that the saints are present with you, and that you are drawn into their holy lives—that to be willingly surrounded by images of the demons (however childish and infantile their representation) will not also affect your heart, and your children’s hearts, and draw them closer to powers that none would call holy? And not just to gaze upon such images, but to fashion them into clothes and costumes and wear them on one’s body?

How many of us in the Roman Church, even the pious, actually venerate holy images as a habit that would make the Bishop’s words true for us, I wonder? We neglect such piety at our peril, as the Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council knew over 1,000 years ago. This neglect might well have contributed over many decades to the decline of the Faith and so many of the problems we see in the Church and beyond. Accompanying the lack of engagement with visual imagery in our liturgy, there is the rise, in the wider culture, of the veneration of images of evil that the Russian Orthodox Bishop is describing. We would do well to reintroduce the veneration of sacred art into our liturgy as a matter of urgency.

And, perhaps the same neglect opened the west door of the Church and left it ajar and unattended, drawing the “smoke of Satan” into the vacuum created by the absence of fragrant incense, followed (who knows?) by the entrance of Satan himself. If he did enter, he would as likely as not be greeted by a shower of spittle, but greeted in a spirit of diversity by a priest facing him directly, worshiping and making a sacrifice. What sort of message does that communicate, I wonder? Those who do realize the seriousness what is going on and object are too often showered with spite, if not spittle, for their troubles.

Look at the imposing west facade of the Gothic Beverly Minster in Yorkshire, England. This is the gate of a fortress designed, I would say, as much to keep certain forces out (and to reassure us by making this clear), as much as it is to let people in.

To repeat a sentence from the quote above:

We know that the actions of our bodies, and the things we do with our lives, affect our hearts and are directly connected to spiritual realms of which we are, on account of our weakness, not always immediately aware. 

Unthinking participation by Catholics in the promotion of the symbolism of Satan is not limited to reckless, light-hearted partying on Halloween. Think for a moment of the modern desire to flee the urban environment to “commune” with nature by experiencing “pristine natural beauty” (i.e. unaltered by man); this is not in itself evil, but it is a sign of something that is - the view that man and his work are unnatural and necessarily destructive to the world. The wilderness used to be the place to go and become civilized through settling and cultivation, and was seen as the place of spiritual warfare with the devil. Christ and the early Church fathers both went out to the wilderness for this reason. Now we flee civilization to embrace the spiritual wild west.

Man is both part of the natural world, and capable, with God’s grace, of raising it up to something greater than anything it could be through its own momentum, by cultivation and civilization in harmony with Creation. When he does so, he participates in the creative force that draws the world to its final end, that is, towards what it ought to be. A symbol of this is beautiful farmland, and even more so, a garden cultivated for its beauty, which bears the mark of the gardener who made it, inspired by the Gardener. Certainly, man is fallen, and his work can destroy too; but where faith and freedom predominate, the general rule is one of improvement.

The public park or botanical garden used to be a place within the city that elevated it through their beauty. Even the New Jerusalem has gardens, new Edens. Now gardens are deliberately unplanted, so to speak, with native plants. This still might be beautiful, but it is not as beautiful as it ought to be. Whether this is the specific intention of the new gardeners or not, it symbolizes the hatred of the influence of man on nature, and the desire to undermine good society, for it says that those species cultivated by man are not natural, not good, because man himself is not part of nature.

And as I said before: symbols matter.

Such gardens, by degrees, bring the wilderness into the polis, and thereby contribute to the forces that bring its spiritual overlord in too. They are anti-Edens, gardens of the culture of the abolition of man. They tell us that the existence of mankind is a failed mission of a God they reject. It tells us that the whole project of mankind itself ought to be aborted.

By contrast, here is a public garden, also in Yorkshire, England, Breezy Knees Garden in the city of York. My guess is that there is not a single uncultivated species in view, and it is all the better for it.

I believe that even if there is no overt religious connection to such public places, they speak to that part in us that would have participated in the medieval devotion to Mary as the Garden Enclosed in the past. Surely it is better to aim to create places in our cities that might be dwelling places for Our Lady than for the serpent? 

Mary not only rests in the Hortus Conclusus - the Garden Enclosed of the Song of Songs - but she is also, traditionally, identified with the garden itself. What saddens me is not so much that people who hate the Church and Mary want to destroy the symbolism that speaks of them; one would expect that, even if it no more than a purely instinctual desire to destroy what is beautiful and created by man. The dismay arises from how little pushback there is from those who believe and ought to know better than to encourage the creation of the symbol of the anti-Mary - the Wicked Witch of the West - in our own backyards.

It is the great deceit of the devil that he convinces so many of us today that he doesn’t exist; I suspect that most who propagate his influence are doing so unwittingly, and would consider the idea that they are the useful fools of Satan risible. And they are likely to scoff at those who suggest it. But this should not put us off.

We have no need ever to fear Satan, as we know, for victory over him has been won, and those of us who have been baptized and have put on Christ participate in that victory. But that does not mean we must pretend he is not a threat and cease to be vigilant in guarding against his influence. Evil is the absence of good. The vacuum created by neglect is itself a problem; what subsequently comes in to fill it will be a greater evil if good does not fight to occupy and tame the wilderness, as St Anthony Abbot did and so many have done since.

St Cyril of Jerusalem wrote the following in his Mystagogical Catechesis (XXXIII, 1073B):

When you renounce all compact with Satan, all compact with hell, God’s paradise is opened for you, which he planted in the East, and whence our first parent was driven forth for his disobedience. This is figured in your turning from the West to the East, which is the symbol of the sun.

And as Gregory of Nyssa pointed out, paradise is here, now, for the baptized, and open for us to enter if we wish.

Every day when we turn towards the East where God planted his paradise, and when we remember our exile from that blissful locality in the East, we have a right to enter ourselves once more.

Representations of paradise and its four rivers in early baptistries and apses confirm this connection. Here is the apse of St John Lateran in Rome showing the four rivers, in the East, with the deer who yearn for those running streams.

Any symbolism that reinforces this wonderful message of joy in the here and now, as much as in the hereafter, is worthy of encouragement, just as any that undermines it should be discouraged. Let us hope that when the devil tries to enter our lives from the west, that he does not do so unnoticed, but rather that we are there to spit on him! St Michael pray for us!