Halloween naysayers warn that, if little Peter dresses up as the devil on Tuesday, he runs the risk of meeting the real Satan, who considers the holiday a tribute.
But the only things remotely satanic about All Hallows’ Eve are strange–and rather harmless–folk rituals: They involve young Irish girls’ underwear and apple peeling.
What about reports of devil worshipers stealing children from their cribs to slaughter them in occult rites? Sadistic adults poisoning trick-or-treaters with tainted candy? The widely known “fact” that the holiday originated in a holiday honoring a satanic or Druidic god?
Nothing but suburban legends and distortions of history, according to those who’ve studied the holiday and the stories surrounding it.
Halloween really had its origins in the Celtic version of New Year’s Eve, if you add to New Year’s revelry the idea of the ghost of recently dead Grampa knocking on the hut door to beg help getting into the afterlife. The ancient Celts divided the year into two parts, summer and winter, and Samhain marked summer’s end and the new year.
As evidence of satanic influence, some have decided the festival honored Samhain, the so-called Celtic god of the dead, but the story propounding this god is only about as ancient as the story of Ebenezer Scrooge. Samhain (pronounced “sow-wen”) just means “summer’s end.”
So don’t blame stale licorice on Satan. He isn’t the one who threw the parties that evolved into Halloween, according to Hans Peter Broedel, a professor of history at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y.
“It was a day when spirits walked around, ghosts walked around and said `Hi.’ That’s the origin. But most of the modern stuff is Christian in origin. . . . It is really a completely Christian holiday,” Broedel said. “There’s nothing satanic about it at all.”
Samhain included some sinister elements, with fairies tricking or trapping people on the feast, but most ghosts in Celtic fables were as friendly as deceased relatives could be expected to be.
The Christian church smartly turned many pagan holidays into celebrations honoring the Christian God and the saints. After St. Patrick arrived in Ireland to convert the island in about 433, Samhain became a Christian festival, as the Druidic religion gradually disappeared. More than 400 years later, well after Druids were gone, Pope Gregory IV made All Saints’ Day–Nov. 1–a celebration for the whole church.
Priests used the remnants of folk belief as a public relations tool to get people to pray.
“The date of Halloween is associated with All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day,” Broedel said. “Witches were not supposed to congregate on Halloween.
“Nobody knows much of what the Druids did anyway. Much of what we know is largely the product of the medieval clerical imagination.”
Ghosts, which in the Druidic period might have looked for a pint of ale from their descendants, were thought to be stuck in purgatory and visiting to request prayers to help them into heaven.
All Souls’ Day, Nov. 2, spread into Christian practice beginning with Abbot Odilo of Cluny, France, in the 11th Century.
“There weren’t any Druids running around medieval Europe. By the time Halloween becomes All Souls’ Day and is celebrated generally, the Druids had been gone for hundreds of years,” Broedel said.
Scholars say one of the few Irish practices that survived from the original Samhain and can be tied by Christian doctrines to the devil is fortune-telling.
That’s where the apples and the underwear come in.
“If a young Irish girl wanted to know who her husband would be, she could try a variety of divination techniques. That’s I think one of the few substantive links between Halloween and magic,” Broedel said.
An Irish woman who wanted to find Mr. O’Right folded her underwear in a particular way, set it outside on Halloween night and checked it in the morning to see what the dew had done to it, Broedel said. Or she peeled an apple in one long strand, threw the skin over her shoulder and looked at how the peel fell to see her future mate’s face or identity.
Unlike fortune-telling, most of modern Halloween originated in medieval Irish fun and Victorian England and America.
Some anti-Halloween tracts trace trick-or-treating to a supposed Druidic practice of extorting food from ignorant pagans. But the phrase “trick-or-treat” originated in the early 20th Century. And its origins lie in two distinct medieval practices.
Once All Souls’ Day became accepted, children went door-to-door, asking for “soul cakes.” Those who got the cakes promised to pray for the souls of their benefactor’s relatives.
Soul-caking eventually melded with the medieval party form of mumming. Mummers would dress up during festivals and go from home to home to dance or play dice, and a mumming play often involved the story of St. George slaying the dragon.
Another Halloween symbol, the jack-o’-lantern, has an ancient Celtic origin as a carved turnip lantern. But the fable of the ghost of Jack of the Lantern, wandering the world carrying his lamp because he could get into neither heaven nor hell, arose only in the last few centuries.
English celebrations of Halloween died out over the years, replaced with Guy Fawkes Day celebrations, when bonfires are lit and children beg for pennies.
But Halloween gained new acceptance in America in the mid-19th Century, with the waves of Irish immigrants driven here by the potato famine. American Protestants adopted some of their customs but, paradoxically, secularized the holiday and added many of its spooky aspects.
“The classic Halloween witch is not someone worshiping Satan. She’s a [Victorian] creature from a fairy tale. They are pure fantasy,” Broedel said.
Also fantasy are some of the horrible things linked to modern Halloween. Although stories of ritual killings by satanists often are bandied about at this time of year, FBI officials say they know of no such incidents.
By the 20th Century, Halloween became a holiday to dress up, trick-or-treat and go to haunted houses. The scary parts of Halloween are what its detractors most often point to as satanic. By dressing up as witches, we glorify what should frighten us, they say.
But fear of evil, and the reminder of it, are what the secular Halloween is all about and what it has been about since Christianity appropriated Samhain and tried to make it sacred. Groups of mummers often included someone dressed up as a devil. And in mummers’ plays, saints–emboldened by the Christian faith–defeated the devil.
We dress up as manifestations of evil to mock it and to remind ourselves of its existence, not to perpetuate it.
On this day of all days, a Christian should feel strong in his protection from Satan when a comic devil raps on his door with a plastic pitchfork.
Perhaps those worried about glorifying evil by participating in Halloween festivities should think of what they can do to defeat real evil, instead of spoiling the fun of costumed children looking for treats.
