Is Halloween a Pagan Holiday?

A Slight Rant and Some Theologizing

Today, many Americans will take to the streets, going from house to house dressed as their favorite fantasy characters, asking neighbors for treats (less they have to resort to ‘tricks’ to get it). Jack ‘O’ Lanterns line the lanes, large skeletons decorate many Ambridge lawns. People prepare by watching scary movies, even horror films, which sometimes even take place on Halloween. Pumpkin flavored pies and drinks are often enjoyed. It is a time of mischief, of whimsy, but also of darker things. The vale between the worlds is thin on All Hallow’s Eve—this has been true since the holiday originated among Medieval Christians, as an opportunity to honor those who departed (but were not dead) in Christ.

Scandalous, isn’t it. A Christian praising Halloween. But it’s worth pointing out that a lot of the ceremonies and celebrations around Halloween are simply misunderstood medieval pastoral traditions. We think of them as superstitious partly because they’ve been sensationalized by the media, partly because they’ve been reinterpreted by Neopagans, and partly because they’ve been critiqued as “superstitious” by protestants, especially protestant modernists. But in fact, there is not that much that is occult or demonic in traditional Samhain practice. Rather, it is a relic of a time when Christianity did not balk at or feel threatened by a unified cosmology, when Christian theology did not feel under attack by every local myth or every intonation of the supernatural or the fantastic, when Christians knew that these human graspings after the divine actually vindicated a creed which claimed that God will someday be all in all, and that even now, all things live and move and have their being in Christ Jesus.

As it is, Samhain festivals were never recorded in any detail until the modern era, long after the Christianization of Europe. Irish mythology as a whole was preserved in a written form by Christian monks. There was something about these Irish and Scottish customs that appealed to the monks, which was compatible with their intuition of the religious orientation of everyday life, of their deep sensing of the supernatural within the natural and the Christic elevation of the natural into the supernatural.  

What I’m getting at is this: Samhain traditions are not pagan, in the sense of being disconnected from the Christian tradition. Rather, they are forms of “pagan” pastoral and agricultural celebration that happened within the tradition, that is, they were celebrated by Christians. Neopagan holidays by and large were first celebrated by Christians, and then the descendants of protestant Christians who no longer lived in agricultural spaces and no longer understood (or sometimes openly despised) the Christian origins of the traditions around them successfully branded these practices “pagan”—in the sense of being inconsistent with Christian faith and practice. By and large, over the course of Church History, Christians have not on the whole objected to agricultural or pastoral practices or the mythologies that accompanied them. They didn’t deride obscure intuitions of nature spirits, Scottish Pixies, English Faeries, or Irish Fae. They didn’t purge the old mythology or sever the link between the spirit world and the physical world. Rather, Christians held to a mythopoetic vision of reality as participants in the development of myth and folklore. They were the ones who taught it, preserved it, celebrated it, lived and moved within it. Truly, Christianity at its best is much more romantic, much more wild, much more convivial, much more fantastic than the tradition of ‘bare paganism’ that we see advocated for in the wake of modern secularism—because this paganism is simply a caricature of its living reality in the bosom of the Christian Church. It is a nature mysticism cut off from its source, cut off from the divine pleroma which is God’s nature, the Heavenly Sophia. While Neopaganists have an admirable urge to reawaken themselves to the transcendent and reconnect themselves to the natural world, without the church they can never be truly pagan; as Chesterton says, the final deed of the ancient pagans was to be baptized.

I know. Not my most charitable polemic on this blog. But at the same time, I think that it’s true. And if all of that is indeed true, there are some practical and theological questions that I must answer. For the rest of this article, I want to talk about these questions candidly. “What is the theological meaning of Halloween?” is the first question I want to answer. And secondly, how should a Christian act in a contemporary space, in which Halloween is disconnected from its history and from the religious community?

First, let’s talk about theology. And to do this, we have to talk about the situatedness of the holiday. Halloween is a holiday that is based on Samhain, which was a medieval Celtic pastoral holiday. That should be said, first and foremost. Whereas, in England, the agricultural year was governed by Lady Day and the Nativity of St. John, in Ireland and Scotland, the pastoral year was dominated by the pastoral holidays Beltane and Samhain. At Beltane (May Day), the cattle would be driven out into the fields to graze for the summer; at Samhain (All Hallows), the cattle would be driven back in, to wait out the winter. In a pastoral society, feasts marking these changes of seasons were important: and because this pastoral society was a religious society, certain figures, specifically St. Mary the Mother of God and the Triumphant Saints of the Church, became the key to understanding the sacred nature of these pastoral events.

In a sense, Beltane and Samhain contemplate the same mystery, but from two different angles. Joined together by the pastoral year, the images of Mary and the Saints mutually exegete one another. Mary is the mother of Jesus, the New Eve, the one on whom the Spirit of God dwells, the one who fully submits to the Father’s Will, who co-suffers with Christ, who is pure, chaste, and holy. The Church, too, bears Christ: in its sacraments, in its faithfulness, in its works of charity and in its hope. She too is the new Eve, in so far as she is the Mother of all the living (those made alive by faith). She has the Spirit upon her, for Christ breathed on the Apostles and the apostolic blessing is handed down from them to the Church’s bishops. At her best, she actively lives in conformity with Christ’s will, the pinnacle of her spiritual exercises is to say with the Virgin mother, “let it be unto me as you have said.” She co-suffers with Christ, being persecuted throughout the world. And because she suffers with Christ, she will also be glorified with him: by her participation in Christ, she is pure, chaste, and holy.

May Day comes after the Easter Celebration: it is the fruit of Easter, that the summer comes and all things are transfigured from frost to growth. All Saints Day comes at the end of the pastoral season, representing THE END, the final judgment, when all things come to the end, the sheep are separated from the goats, the Saints are seen in their glory, and God becomes all in all. It is an apocalyptic event, where Christ is revealed at the Right Hand of Power, and all things are transfigured, and the saints receive their reward. The veil of time is torn back so that all souls might see this glorious transformation and this cosmic destiny. As the herds are brought back in, there is a celebration: the summer is over, time has run its course, and all things have come to a fitting end.

Halloween was traditionally the evening vigil that accompanied the celebration of All Saints on November 1^st. Vigils and feasts go together in the Christian church, just as passion and resurrection do. When we hold vigil, we take to heart the words of Jesus, who tells us to be alert and watchful. We pray, because prayer conforms our heart and our minds to God; we fast, because when our eyes, ears, mouths, and heart are less full of things, there’s more room for God. All Saints Eve, or All Hallow’s Eve, is a time for prayer as we prepare to contemplate the mystery of the Church Triumphant and the End of History. In a sense, if All Saints Day is the triumphant end, Hallows Eve is the act just before the end, when all things are gathered in, when we all wait together, when we are on the cusp of the end of the world.

The veil grows thinner on Halloween. Halloween is a liminal point, a time of transition toward the end, which is the glorification of all things. It is a time before we meet the saints at the high altar and commune with them in the body and blood of Jesus. It is a time just before sunlight, when all things are shrouded in anticipation, in secrecy, in mystery.

And in this sense, it is also the last triumph of darkness. Every time we open ourselves up to the spiritual world, the real world, we open ourselves up to both good and evil. Ghosts and ghouls, witches and sorcerers, undead skeletons, calling crows, and grim reapers pepper the landscape on Halloween because it is a spiritual time of year. And where there is spirit, there will always be twisted souls that seek spiritual or magical power. On the night before All Saints Day, these ones, too, come out and have their say. Because the veil is thin, between our world and theirs.

This brings us to a very practical question. This is all fine and good, Ben, you might say. But should a Christian then celebrate Halloween? It may have traditional roots within our tradition, its traditions may be medieval and pagan —and not neopagan—; but that’s certainly not how its viewed today. Today, it is an exaltation of everything anti-Christian: Satanism, witchcraft, devilry, serial killers, death, decay, monsters. The list could go on.

I think how I would answer this hypothetical reader is by saying this: don’t participate in commercialized Halloween. But don’t stop participating in this lovely tradition because of a ‘culture wars’ mindset, because you need to stay pure from the creeping ‘paganism’ in the world around you. After all, you don’t stop celebrating Christmas because culturally it is about presents and Santa Claus, or Thanksgiving because culturally it tends towards gluttony. Instead: we need to think about how to celebrate Halloween well. What traditions from the past can help guide us towards a spiritually meaningful All Saints Eve and Day? How can we reconnect with loved ones, both living by gathering in community and those who have passed on by dwelling on their memories? How can we prepare for the festival of All Saints Day, for receiving Christ’s body and blood, as a family and community of committed Jesus-followers? We need to ask ourselves in what ways we might be able to see beauty on Halloween, see the thinness between our world and the world of spirits, how we can catch glimpses of liminality and the fullness of the created order, and the symphonic power of God by which he unites all things into one.

There are fun traditions that you can do as a family. Carve pumpkins and light candles in them, take walks through nature, light bonfires, find a Hawthorn tree, leave little gifts for the small folks. Spend the night in vigil, praying for your loved ones, both alive and past. Spend some time making amends to those who are still living. Have a nice dinner with family and friends. Sing songs and hymns. Light more candles to brighten the night. And of course, drink some good autumn beer.

And of course, on Halloween, we need to be especially wary of dark spiritual beings. Christians do not mess with the demonic, in any form it may take. People engage in all sorts of despicable practices on Halloween—from animal sacrifices to mutilations and curses. We need to be aware of it; we need to not be around it; but also, we don’t need to be terrified by it or allow it to ruin our own celebrations. There of course is a dark side to all of this that I’ve been talking about, and sometimes this can be pretty public. But I’m convinced all of these devils and witches are ultimately going out of season. Witches and devils are popular Halloween costumes, they are a dime a dozen on this night, we give them their say while laughing at the ridiculous costumes of friends and family; but these impersonators are all gone by the morning, along with their works and their deeds. They are simply the death-throes of the the principles of darkness, the last convulsions of an evil which seeks to avoid the inevitable breaking of dawn. These powers are wearing out, and their darkness will soon be extinguished in the light of the Lord of the Saints, of the Church, and of the Virgin Mother of God, Jesus Christ.