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HALLOWE'EN: ALL SAINTS, ALL HALLOWS, ALL SOULS - ALL VERY CONFUSING
Halloween "celebrations" have grown out of all proportion in the UK in recent years, eclipsing if not entirely replacing bonfire night on 5 November. Pumpkins are now available in shops and supermarkets and grown on allotments to an unprecedented extent. But some people in this country have misgivings about Halloween. They regard it as an unauthentic American import, with no roots in this country's cultural history. They see it as an excuse to foist meaningless pre-Christmas merchandise on the public and for ill-mannered children to intimidate householders by demanding sweets with menaces. Additionally, despite the warm glow of pumpkin lanterns, there is a feeling that Halloween belongs to the pagan world of witches, ghosts and creatures of the night.
So where does the truth lie and should we have misgivings about celebrating Halloween in a church based community centre in the 21st century? To begin with, the origins of Halloween can be traced back to the Celtic Druids around 700 B.C. who believed that the souls of the dead returned to inhabit the bodies of the living on 31 October. Villagers donned masks and costumes and paraded to the outskirts of their towns to trick roving spirits into leaving.
Later, 31 October was incorporated into the Christian calendar as All Hallow’s Eve, honouring martyrs and saints. The word "Halloween," is a corruption of All Hallows Eve. Children wearing costumes offered to fast for departed souls in exchange for money or an offering. The day after Halloween,1 November, came to be known as "All Hallows Day" (or "All Saints Day"), a Christian day of observance in honour of saints. All Soul's Day on 2 November (following All Saints' Day) is a festival in the Roman Catholic Church based on the conviction that the faithful can hasten the deliverance of souls in purgatory through prayer and self-denial. It was instituted by Odilo in the monastery of Cluny (France) in 998 and is still observed by some sections of the Anglican Church.
Irish Catholics fleeing from the potato famine in the 1840s introduced Halloween to the United States, including the practice of carving jack-o’lanterns. According to Irish folklore, Jack was a notorious drunkard who tricked Satan into climbing a tree. Jack then carved an image of the cross in the trunk, trapping the devil up the tree. He made a deal that if the devil promised never to tempt him again, Jack would let him down the tree. When Jack died, he was denied entrance to heaven because of his evil ways but was also denied access to hell because he had tricked the devil. Instead, the devil gave him a single ember to light his way through the darkness. The ember was placed inside a hollowed-out turnip so it would glow longer. The Irish originally used turnips as their "Jack's lanterns". But when they emigrated to America, they found that pumpkins were far more plentiful than turnips. So the jack-o-lantern in America became a hollowed-out pumpkin lit with an ember or candle.
The Halloween custom of trick-or-treating originated not with the Irish Celts, but with a ninth-century European custom called “souling”. On 2nd November, All Souls Day, early Christians would walk from village to village begging for "soul cakes," made out of square pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes the beggars would receive, the more prayers they would promise to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors. At the time, it was believed that the dead remained in limbo for a time after death, and that prayer, even by strangers, could expedite a soul's passage to heaven.
So although some dubious organisations and individuals have adopted Halloween for the wrong reasons, despite the Addams family emphasis on spiders, ghosts, witches and black cats, the day itself does not have its origins in any kind of satanic practices. It grew out of the rituals of Celts celebrating a new year, and out of medieval prayer rituals in Europe. Like so many things in the modern world (including Father Christmas aka Santa Claus), it was absorbed and modified in the United States and re-exported back to Europe in its current secular guise.The link with the past and the meaning of Halloween have been lost. Today,it is not uncommon for churches, especially in the United States, to celebrate Halloween by organizing parties or pumpkin carving events for children. Some people in this country still resist, but there's no denying that pumpkins really are an amazing colour.
What do you think?
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John Quysner, 19/10/2010 |
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