Halloween's Pagan Origins
Is Halloween more than a goofy night for candy and costumes? Those evangelical Christians who bemoan it as a pagan holiday know what they're talking about.[Original headline: Halloween's Pagan Origins Are Pretty Scary, Kids]
The authority for that assertion is none other than proudly pagan Gerina Dunwich, a self-professed witch of 25 years' standing. Dunwich, of Los Angeles, explains the spiritual significance of Oct. 31 in her new paperback, "The Pagan Book of Halloween" (Penguin).
Much to the author's regret, Europe's "old religion" of pre-Christian times and worship of various nature deities--she lists 43 goddesses and 21 gods around the world--was supplanted over the centuries by devotion to the one God of the Bible. Or, as Dunwich would have it, "the Christians' patriarchal god."
Today, with networking assists from the Internet, the ancient creed is being reconstituted by seekers, occultists and feminists. In his Encyclopedia of American Religions, J. Gordon Melton catalogues dozens of groups, some defunct and none sizable, that practice "Neo-Paganism," "magick," witchcraft or Wicca, and related forms of worship.
Long ago, Dunwich writes, the church counteracted the pagans by Christianizing their old rituals. Since the pagans had their festival of the dead, the 7th-century papacy introduced All Saints' Day to honor early Christian martyrs. In 900, the date of All Saints' Day was switched from May 13 to Nov. 1, in line with the pagan date of Oct. 31.
For pagans, that was the holiest night of the year, the point when the connection to supernatural forces was strongest and the barrier between the living and the dead was weakest.
In the British Isles, Oct. 31 was the pagan Samhain, or "summer's end." For Christians, the night before All Saints' was Allhallows Eve, which evolved into "Halloween."
By Dunwich's account, virtually all our associations with Halloween are rooted in pagan ritual:
Nighttime in general; bats, cats, spiders, broomsticks, skeletons, ghosts, goblins, cauldrons and masquerades; trick-or-treating (recalling deeds of mischievous spirits); jack-o'-lanterns (to scare away earthbound ghosts); and bobbing for apples (drawn from an old divination rite). Even the black and orange color scheme is symbolically pagan: black for death and magic, orange for harvest time.
Dunwich says 19th-century Irish immigrants brought to America the pagan holdovers that constitute what we think of as Halloween. At the same time, other immigrants were introducing Santa Claus, decorated trees and other non-Christian add-ons to create the modern American Christmas.
For Halloween, the Irish drew upon lore of the pre-Christian Celtic peoples and their priestly caste, the Druids. Theirs was a lusty and sometimes sinister creed. Druids are thought to have burned to death prisoners of war and criminals on the holy night. Sometimes horses, oxen and especially cats would be roasted alive as sacrifices, too. The purpose was not just to appease the deity of the dead but also to foretell the future by the way victims died.
In one legend, every seven years a dark-skinned race stole children and sacrificed them to their god. Another said townspeople were required to surrender two-thirds of their children to a feared race of gods every Nov. 1.
Is that the inspiration for those Halloween slasher films? Perhaps, but Dunwich emphasizes that modern Neo-Pagans have not revived such ancient traditions.
As for lust, she writes that some Wiccans still perform "the Great Rite" at Halloween, sacred copulation between the high priestess and high priest of a coven. This rouses "magickal energy" and represents the sacred union of "the Goddess and Her consort, the Horned God," a masculine personification of "the Life Force" that dies each year on this night.
But Dunwich says the act "is normally carried out in private" and that many prefer instead to enact it symbolically.
And today's Neo-Pagans believe in Eastern religions' teaching of reincarnation, an endless sequence of lives with one's fate determined by karma, the accumulation of positive and negative deeds. For that reason, she reports, wise pagans no longer practice black magic.
• Story originally published by •
The Washington Post | By Richard N. Ostling - October 28 2000
