Over the past several months we have essayed what amounts to a series of light pieces exploring the many mutt holidays America inherited from Western Europe. There are more of them than might immediately spring to mind: Christmas, Easter, Carnival, May Day, April Fool's Day, various Summer solstice celebrations and some others more obscure like St. Johns and St. Bartholomew's Days. I call them muttish because they are almost all admixtures of pagan practices channeled and harnessed and appropriated by a Christian hierarchy. In many cases, the pagan part is downplayed or denied by, or simply unknown to great masses of people, but it's there, and if you were really to sit down and analyze it, that pagan element is usually the most potent part of the observances. Which, naturally is why Puritans wanted to do away with the holidays altogether. But that's a game that can't be won -- not on this plane.
When it comes to Halloween, the reverse is true -- the pagan part is all too obvious. In fact some, maybe most, people have no idea that there is purportedly a Christian element, but there is, and it's baked right into the name. Since the 9th century A.D. November 1 has been the date the Christian church has honored as All Saints Day, or All Hallows Day, with November 2 being All Soul's Day, and October 31, then All Hallows Eve. Just as on Christmas Eve, All Hallows Eve was originally meant to be the beginning of the next day's celebration, a time to honor saints and martyrs, with All Souls being the time to remember the spirits of ALL the dead. As is done throughout the year, candles were lit in their memory, vigils were held, and it naturally the idea arose that in conjuring the memory of the dead, their SPIRITS would also return.
This is the ostensible Christian architecture for the holiday, but as you will perceive, as a specifically CHRISTIAN idea, the connection is about as slender as a spider web. Compared with Hallowe'en, these other major western holidays are easy to connect to Christ's philosophy: i.e., Christmas to generosity, Easter to ultimate sacrifice, and so forth. Believe it or not, April Fool's Day (the traditional Feast of Fools) is very easy to reconcile to Christian teaching -- it's about the lowest of the low being elevated to the highest of the high. And yes, Carnival is a bacchanal, but it is a debauch justified by the Lent that is supposed to kick in the next day. By contrast, Hallowtide is about honoring the dead, and nearly every culture and religion on the earth does that.
So despite the fact that some commentators like to stress the holiday's Christian history, it really is much more like May Day, say, or Summer Solstice celebrations in being straight-up primal. Some believe, with logic, that the timing for Hallowtide relates to pagan harvest observances, when the year transitions from summer to winter, day to night, dark to light. In the British Isles, the Gaelic cultures call this Samhain. At this threshold time, it was believed that it was easier to communicate with spirits. There were bonfires, costumes were worn, pranks were played, treats were solicited door to door, there were games like apple bobbing, and divination ceremonies, such as gazing into mirrors to learn who one's future mate would be. Most of these are recognizable as things people still do on Halloween, or did until quite recently. So ghosts have always been part of it, essentially the main part. The connection with witches and witchcraft is also obvious, as is the relevance of all of those nocturnal creatures we still associate with the holiday:, especially owls, bats, and black cats.
How old Samhain is no one knows, but Christianity arrived to Britain in the Early Middle Ages. Christianity itself was already a mutt institution drawing from several cultures. At its core (irrespective of Christ's own teachings) it was a Hebrew death cult, the narrative climax of which involves a crucifixion, a sojourn in a crypt, and a resurrected corpse. But even before get to such tantalizing stuff as the raising of Lazarus or the Book of Revelations, there's all sorts of dazzling razzmatazz in Judaism, drawn from all the previous polytheism of the Levant, and Persian Zoroastrianism. Devils and demons and magic and wizards and signs and symbols and a philosophy of light vs. dark. Then it was brought to Rome, where it merged with rituals drawn from existing Mystery Cults. In relationship to the iconography of Halloween, I think also of Greco-Roman mythology, of Ovid's Metamorphosis, of vampires and werewolves. And older monstrous and magical characters, like Circe and Medusa and the Cyclops.
But if you think of it, the Classical spirit was rational, and there is little of that in Halloween or the superstitions of major religions. Christianity was not very long official in Rome before the Germanic invasions changed the face of Western Europe, bringing with them the elements that have come to be known as Gothic. I was raised an Episcopalian (the Church of England), so I feel closer than most American Protestants to these Medieval aesthetic elements: castle-like grey stone churches with stained glass windows, pipe organs, incense, writing in Germanic fonts, churchyards, crypts. Religion has always meant these trappings for me; I have no idea what's supposed to happen in those bright, cheery modern places most contemporary Protestants attend. They remind me of racquetball courts.
I was also raised in New England, where the Puritan founders were at but one remove from the mother church. Many graveyards in New England are centuries old, with markers decorated with Medieval imagery like winged skulls and scary Latin inscriptions like "Vanitas Vanitatum". The Puritans rejected Catholicism and the "too Catholic" Church of England to the extent of banning holidays, including Halloween, but in so doing they amplified the holiday's power by BELIEVING in witches and devil and familiars and evil spirits and placing them right in everyone's midst. On some level, Catholics and Anglicans, by enacting rituals, were just playing "let's pretend" and knew it to a certain degree. The Puritans obsessed about witches so much they became a powerful classification of humanity, not just the nice healing lady you went to for herbal tea when you had a toothache or whatever. If the thing is out in the open it's quotidian. If it's hidden, if NO ONE KNOWS what they do in secret, hey, maybe they fly through the sky on broomsticks in the night.
I've written quite a bit about the Gothic and Romantic writers who made such an impact on the symbols of Halloween starting in the early 19th century. Many posts about that here.
In America, for a long time and up until fairly recently there was a depopulated desolation that was scary. There were woods and fields to cross at night. People lived miles from one another. We begin to get stories like the one about the Bell Witch in a cabin in Tennessee. There are the tales of Washington Irving and Hawthorne and Poe. (Interesting fact I did not know until recently: after being well populated for a time, New England sort of emptied out again in the late 19th century as people moved to cities and newer states out west. On the heels of that, you get H.P. Lovecraft). So horror emerges as its own literary genre, and it begins to codify how Halloween is expressed.
Because, Puritanism notwithstanding, large numbers of immigrants arrived in the mid 19th century to change the face of American. Irish and Scottish immigrants brought their Halloween traditions with them. One of their old customs, carving faces in large turnips and placing a candle inside for a lantern, got an American twist when the native pumpkin proved a much more capacious and suitable vegetable for the job.
Towards the tail of the 19th century, Halloween's conventions begin to get super formalized when commercialism seeps in and entrepreneurs realize they can sell candy, costumes, and tickets to spook shows on the holiday. Film and television caused Halloween to explode in significance (we've written about lots of classic horror films and related stuff here). And lest we forget (we tend to) so did radio -- possibly the spookiest mass medium of all. Orson Welles' famous War of the Worlds broadcast was on Halloween. Some other tasty tidbits:
Harry Houdini died on Halloween. For many years there were seances to try to connect with his spirit every Halloween. For all I know, there still are. The centennial of his passing is coming up in a couple of years. I will do something special on that night for sure.
My favorite (and the best) Halloween scene in any movie is the one in Meet Me in St. Louis. Captures what the American version is all about. The 1922 silent Scandinavian movie Haxan is the best at evoking what is scary about witchcraft in the primitive part of the mind.
New York has a lot to thank the late Ralph Lee for in how it celebrates Halloween. He co-founded the Village Halloween Parade with the folks at Theater for the New City -- it will be turning 50 years old this year! I just may have to attend that one, as it has been awhile. Here's me with friend Sarah Williams at the parade circa 1989 or 1990:
Theater for the New City still has a massive Halloween Ball every year. Here's the deets on that.
But we're not done talking about Ralph Lee, because for years he put on the most jaw-dropping annual Halloween spectacle called the Procession of the Ghouls at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. He passed away back in May, and I see there is no event this Halloween, but I dearly hope with my heart that his company the Mettawee River Theatre Company will return in future with new editions. It's not like the puppets and masks went anywhere! At any rate, THAT is the Saintly spirit I will be lighting my candle to this All Hallow's Eve. The late Ralph Lee.
Happy Halloween!
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