Joe Heschmeyer examines the supposed pagan origins of Halloween or “All Hallows Eve” and answers the question: Should Christians boycott Halloween?

Transcription:

Joe:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. This time of year people often ask if we should really be celebrating Halloween. After all, isn’t Halloween just a Christianized version of an ancient pagan holiday called Samhain? Wasn’t that some ancient Celtic pagan ritual day, which they contacted the dead and had bonfires to ward off evil spirits and the dead walked among the living. If you’ve heard any of that, I’m excited to tell you that’s all mythological. That’s not true. That’s not true history. That’s based on bad, outdated scholarship that had very little evidentiary value in the first place, which we now have strong reasons to believe is flatly untrue. So to get there, I want to look at several different sources, and I want to start with Robert Davis from the University of Glasgow up in Scotland, in his escaping through flames. Halloween is a Christian festival because in there he points out that it’s actually kind of controversial to say what should be really straightforward, namely that Halloween is a Christian feast.

It is the eve of all holies or all hallowed. So all saints, the word for saint is the word for holy is hallowed. So if you remember in the our Father, hallowed Be Thy name. So the evening before that, like Christmas Eve, all Hallows Eve becomes Halloween. That’s it. It’s not a pagan day. Nevertheless, to say that these days is to court hostility from two rival factions. On the one hand neo Pagans, people who imagine themselves as the heirs to the ancient Druids and this Celtic religion that they think existed before Christianity and they’re trying to restore it and they’ve tried to take Halloween as their rightful kind of lineage. So for instance, here’s a video from a Pagan on YouTube just from two days ago making this argument.

CLIP:

Hello, my name is Jacob Tots, and welcome back to the Wisdom of Odin. It’s finally autumn. I finally get to wear my scarf again, and this also means we’re closer to one of the best holidays and pagan celebrations that still exist today. Now, most people might know this holiday as Halloween. However, the origins of Halloween are within Samhain, which is spelled Sam Hain.

Joe:

So that’s the first group, and you kind get it if they want to claim the holiday, they don’t want to find out that they really didn’t. There is no such thing as old Celtic paganism and they didn’t have a big religious holiday on Samhain. That’s probably not going to be good news to the Pagans, but weirder are that there’s a bunch of evangelical Christians, mostly in the US who are convinced that it’s sinful to celebrate Halloween because they also think Halloween is of Pagan, not Christian origin. They also buy into this story about so and so. They think it’s satanic and idolatrous and dishonoring to God. So here’s a kind of classic example from the Christian perspective.

CLIP:

So Halloween was a celebration to honor or remember the dead. It was called All Hallows Eve, but many people can trace it back all the way to the Pagans, specifically a Celtic pagan celebration called Samhain. Now, this was basically a magical harvest festival that prepared people for the winter that was to come. It was not Christian at all. It was used to worship specifically other gods.

Joe:

But as Davis points out this idea that Halloween is just a thinly papered over Christian version of a Pagan holiday, it’s firmly ingrained in the popular imagination, partly because of older ethnographic scholarship. So 19th century to mid 20th century, you had scholars who would seriously make the claims you’re still hearing people make today, and as a result it’s become very difficult to question those assumptions. After all, as he points out, they’re repeated annually in serious journalism, the broadcast media, their pervasively on the internet, and even in well-intended educational literature. Rarely do people actually stop and say, well, how do we know that to be true? What’s the actual proof of this connection between so and Halloween? That’s what I want to do today because it turns out that evidence is not there at all.

In Davis’ words, he says, deeper scrutiny of the tissue of conjecture, supposition, and survivalism on which the account of the pagan Halloween rests raises the most serious doubts about the accustomed identification of Halloween with pre-Christian Celtic religious practice. And he knows that even imagining there is such a thing as Celtic Paganism is probably not an intelligible idea, but this whole popular story, the one that if you think you know better than your neighbor about Halloween, you’ve probably bought into is itself a myth. It is false. And to show that I want to take one of the popular presentations from National Geographic and just show how in a very short span of time it advances five feces that we can say pretty definitively are not true. So here’s a video and then we’ll unpack it one by one.

CLIP:

It all began with the Celts a people whose culture had spread across Europe more than 2000 years ago. October 31st was the day they celebrated the end of the harvest season in a festival called sowing. That night also marked the Celtic New Year and was considered a time between years a magical time when the ghost of the dead walked the earth.

It was the time when the veil between death and life was supposed to be at its thinnest

On Samhain. The villagers gathered and lit huge bonfires to drive the dead back to the spirit world and keep them away from the living. But as the Catholic church’s influence grew in Europe, it frowned on the pagan rituals like Samhain. In the seventh century, the Vatican began to merge it with a church sanctioned holiday. So November 1st was designated All Saints Day to honor martyrs and the deceased faithful.

Both of these holidays had to do with the afterlife and about survival after death. It was a calculated move on the part of the church to bring more people into the fold.

All Saints Day was known then as Hallus Hallow means holy or saintly. So the translation is roughly mass of the saints. The night before October 31st was all Hallow Eve, which gradually morphed into Halloween.

Joe:

Alright, so the Halloween is Pagan idea rests on really five claims or five assumptions. Number one, there’s a people called the Kelps and they have a common culture and common religion and common liturgical calendar where they’re all celebrating this feast day on the same day. Number two sa, their feast Day is also the Celtic New Year. That’s going to be important because as a result of that, we get to number three. It’s this magical time between the years in which the ghost of the dead can walk among the living on earth. Number four, this is why bonfires are created to ward off the dead and drive them back. And number five, when Christianity comes along, the Catholic church invents all day depending on the version of the story, either as a Christian alternative to Samhain, a response to Samhain or just a Christian version of Samhain.

We wanted to keep this pagan feast day, but we just change the name. It’s like doing somebody else’s homework and you just scratch out their name and put your name on it. Well, here’s the thing, all five of those claims are false. Number one, there is no one group called the Celts. The Celtic is this broad linguistic category that is sometimes used to describe a bunch of different tribes and cultures and peoples and languages that did not have the same religion. Number two, Samhain is not a Celtic anything. It’s an Irish day and it’s not as far as we can tell. New Year’s, we know when the Celts celebrated New Year’s, and it wasn’t on November 1st, number three, Samhain was not viewed as far as we can tell as a magical time of year or between the years in which the dead are walking among the living.

We don’t have any of that in the historical evidence. This is just modern fantasies about the past. Number four, while there are bonfires that are sometimes used on all Hall Eve, it turns out these are of Christian and not Pagan origin. And number five, all Saints Day being on November 1st has literally nothing to do with sa, and we can see that from the evidence. So let’s look at each of those in turn. Number one was there one big Celtic pagan religion. So I dunno if you caught this. I’m going to play you just a couple clips, a couple seconds in the clip we just heard and just listen to the way they speak about the CELs as if they’re a real group. That’s a monolithic kind of hole.

CLIP:

It all began with the Celts a people whose culture had spread across Europe more than 2000 years ago. October 31st was the day they celebrated the end of the harvest season in a festival called sowing.

Joe:

So the reason people like Robert Davis say it’s not even clear, it’s intelligible to speak of pre-Christian Celtic religious practice is because the Celts are people originally from central Europe and then they spread out in all directions. So they go as far east as was now Turkey. So when St. Paul writes to the Galatians, those are Celtic people, they have started speaking and writing in Greek. They have become Roman pagans and then started practicing Christianity. But that should immediately raise some red flags like, oh, it doesn’t sound like they’re doing Samhain over there in Turkey. And they spread all across Southern Poland and India, parts of Eastern Europe. They go across what are called the low country Southern Germany, France, Spain, especially the northwest tip of Spain, Galacia, and then the British Isles as well. Now within a fairly short span of time, other tribes and groups kind of push them out.

And so later on when we talk about the Celts, we typically mean northwest Spain, Northwest France, Ireland, and then Scotland, England, Wales. Still these are large swaths of area speaking several different languages having pretty different cultures. And so it’s a myth and a mistake to treat them as one monolithic group that has a culture, that’s a people that is spread across Europe. That’s just not how tribes worked or work. Malcolm Chapman makes this point really effectively in his book, the CELs, the construction of a myth that KET is not even what these different tribes called themselves. Rather. Cal toy comes from the Greek historian ISTs using it to refer to a group of barbarians north and west of the Greeks. It’s just kind of a catchall for the barbarians over there. It’s not an accurate term to describe any one group of people, and Chapman begins his book actually quoting JR Tolkien, who in addition to writing the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit knew a ton about language.

If you know anything about Tolkien, you know that to be true, and he points out how maddening because there is a language family called Celtic, but it doesn’t refer to just one group of people any more than you would talk about the romance peoples and lump together modern Italians and Spaniards. It’s these are not the same people, French and Portuguese. There’s enough differences that you wouldn’t lump all those together presumably into one is like Latins or romance peoples, but that’s what’s happening here in Tolkien’s words to many, perhaps two most people outside the small company of the great scholars past and present Celtic of any sort is a magic bag into which anything may be put and out of which almost anything may come, anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the gods as of the reason.

In other words, people are talking nonsense and just imagining stuff pulling out of this magic bag of history, Celtic fill in the blank. So if you want to imagine ancient pagans doing your preferred thing, just call it Celtic. It’s a vague enough term that no one can really say you’re wrong. There’s going to be a few more reasons for that as well. As I mentioned, this is a term not used by any groups of themselves, is the term the Greeks use as a catchall for non-Greek people in a certain part of Europe. Similarly, they use Persian as kind of a catchall for the non-Greek people to the east of them. But as Chapman points out, we would never use the fact that the Greeks call them all Persians as evidence that they had the same ethnicity, language and culture all across the Middle East. They clearly did not and do not.

And yet we treat the entire northwest of Europe as if it’s populated by a single people that we can call the kelps. So the word barbarian, by the way, I’ve used that a few times here. That is the Greek term for non-Greek coming from the way they sound when they talk bar, bar, bar, bar, bar. And you wouldn’t be so foolish as to imagine. The barbarians are like one group of people. Oh, the Barbarian king said the new barbarian feast days is on X day. No, of course not. But you’re using kelt, you’re using a term that’s about that level of inaccurate. Another reason that matters is because among the different Celtic peoples, like the Gauls in France, we know a couple things about their religion and a couple things that limit our knowledge of their religion. So of all people, I want to turn down to Julius Caesar who knew the Gauls pretty well from having fought them.

And he wrote an entire book on the Gaelic wars and he points out that the Druids, even though they would use Greek characters to transliterate their language or languages in public and private transactions when it came to religion, they wouldn’t write anything down. Now, he hypothesizes that they seem to do that for two reasons. Number one, because they don’t want to divulge their teachings to the larger populace. And number two, because they’re afraid that if they get accustomed to writing, then they won’t have as much stuff committed to memory. So everything was transmitted at the level of the Druids, like the religious teachers orally, nothing was written down and it was actually taught not to write things down apparently. Do you see why that makes it very difficult to say? And they definitely had this religion and this is definitely what it looked like. And here are the doctrines and here are the feast days.

In addition to the fact that you’re lumping together people from Spain, France, England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, all into one group. Many of the people within that group are not literate, and many of the ones that are literate as a matter of principle won’t write their religious teachings down. So now jump forward a couple thousand years and try to guess what their religion was. And you can see why scholars have been stymied. So when someone tells you confidently, here’s what happened at sen, and here’s all of the old ancient Celtic rituals, they’re making that up because we don’t have the evidence. The little bits we do have actually point against the claims about sa. So Caesar goes on to say one of the leading tenets of the French Celts that he knew the galls were that the souls do not become extinct but pass after death from one body to another.

Now in other words, they believed in reincarnation. Now if you believe in reincarnation, you’re probably not celebrating SA in the mythological version of it, national Geographic and others have put out of a day of commemorating the dead. Well, according to this view, the dead aren’t even dead. They’ve just gone to live in some other body, so they’re probably not walking around among the dead on one night of the year. No, they’re walking around among the dead all the time because they’re a different person. Now my point there is there isn’t this whole idea of Celtic paganism is a misnomer and is a myth. There’s great work done on this, by the way, ironically, by a historian who is also a pagan Ronald Hutton in his book The Stations of the Sun, a History of the Rural Year in Britain, and he points out that modern scholars no longer believe in this idea of a Celtic religion because it doesn’t make any sense.

He points out in the old days, they would look at this Irish God who was known as Lou LUGH, and then they would notice there are all these Roman cities that we find everywhere from England to Southern France to the Netherlands, to Northern France, to Poland with inscriptions in France and Spain as well that have lu as part of the name or lug as part of the name. And they thought, ah, these must be cities named in honor of this local God. But as Hutton points out, the problem with that theory is in Roman ga we actually find hundreds of religious dedications to different gods, and not one of them refers to this Irish God Lou. And so we now think that Lou probably is not a term for this God, but rather the word meant something else. Maybe the God being worshiped in Ireland isn’t the same one.

Pagans in France or Spain or Poland or wherever are worshiping, which of course makes sense. But as Hutton points out, this point matters because this same generation of scholars who fell for this idea of their pan Celtic deities, that all these different tribes worship the same gods, and even by the same names also tended to fall for the idea of pan Celtic festivals that all of these different Celts celebrated an important religious feast day called Samhain. It turns out that is built on this not just rocky foundation, but a foundation we know to be false. It just papers over all the differences between these different groups and treats them as one group with one culture. Now I’m leaving aside one group of Celts which are the Irish because it needs to be treated a little separately. As Davis points out, we do find Irish evidence of Salin.

The problem is we only find Irish evidence of saun just like we only found Irish evidence of the God lie. So the fact that all of the evidence for Saun comes from Irish material is reinforced by the fact that we find no instances whatsoever of anything Halloween looking before Christianity in early Welsh or Scottish material except in areas of heavy Irish migration. So to the extent you have anything like Saun, it seems to be only in Ireland or places where the Irish are migrating and showing up, but then you say, okay, fine, it’s not a Celtic feast day then Irish feast Day, isn’t that the same thing? Well, no, for two reasons, number one, because the whole idea of the Catholic church changed its liturgical calendar to respond to this Celtic Feast Day presupposes this thing is a big thing across Europe. The idea that the entire church is calendar was going to be changed to respond to one island, no offense, Ireland is obviously less plausible.

But number two, and actually more importantly, even though we find plenty of references to Samhain, none of them give any indication of anything like a religious or supernatural significance. So I want you to think about that because you’ll hear these very detailed accounts about everything that happened at SEN and all these religious feasts and festivals and rights and all this, and none of it is true. None of that is coming. Now look, let’s be clear. The fact we don’t have any evidence of it doesn’t mean people weren’t doing something, but it does mean we don’t know what they were doing. If anything, we have plenty of evidence of what they were doing. None of it mentions religion. But the popular story is that this is a religious holy day by all evidence. It’s not. This is a harvest festival. So this is an agrarian society where you’re working hard in the field and then it’s harvest time and you’re gathering everything up, and then on this day, everybody gets together because the work is over and it’s time to have a feast and celebrate.

It’s like a retirement party, but for the year. I mean in the same way that you might have a party when your kid’s school gets out, but that doesn’t make it like a religious festival. It’s just like, Hey, we’ve got free time. It’s Friday evening, let’s go to the bar. That kind of mentality, that’s what’s going on with that one by all the available evidence. I want to repeat Davis’s claim that we have recognition, but it is almost exclusively to agrarian routines and there is no indication of actions exhibiting a religious or supernatural significance. So we’ve seen so far, number one, there is no Pan Celtic religious festival across Europe called Saan does not exist. It’s a scholarly myth. Number two, there is a local Irish harvest festival, but it doesn’t appear to have any clear religious overtones at all. So the idea that Halloween is a big response by the Christians because they’re worried that what the Irish people are relaxing after the harvest is nonsensical, right? So everything else that we’re going to hear about how the dead walked among the living on Saun, those are just myths that non Celtic, non Pagan people have invented and projected onto the past. It gets to the second claim was Sen, the Celtic New Year, because if you remember from the National Geographic clip, it just casually claimed that it was

CLIP:

That night also marked the Celtic New Year and was considered a time between years.

Joe:

So you can see why it matters that is allegedly New Year’s because it’s its time between years when the dead can walk among the living. And you can find, if you go to the history channel’s website and look up what is the history of Halloween, they claim the same thing. There’s this group called the Kelp, which channel that isn’t true. The Kelps who lived 2000 years ago, mostly in the area that’s now the Ireland, the United Kingdom in Northern France celebrated their new year on November 1st. They just claim this as if this is a clear fact of history and it’s not. It’s simply untrue. As Davis points out, the only pre-Christian Celtic calendar we have makes no mention of sa. It’s from France, not from Ireland, and it clearly has the new year at the winter solstice, not November 1st. So you might say, well, where did this myth that the new year started on November 1st?

Start from, well, it started from Sir John Rise in the 19th century. He’s a philologist, meaning he’s studied languages. He suggested that it had been the Celtic New Year, this is his invention, but he was clear he didn’t get that from any ancient records. He wasn’t able to point to any ancient documents that said that. Instead, he was looking at 19th century Welsh and Irish folklore and then taking from those stories projecting onto the past that therefore November 1st must have originally been the new year. Now we can’t prove that’s wrong, I suppose, but there’s no evidence for it. In fact, there’s a good deal of evidence against it. The problem is as Ronald Hutton points out writing Christianity and the Roman calendar all enter whales in Ireland as part of the same process. So by the time you have literacy, it’s because Christians coming from a Roman background have arrived.

And so the earliest calendars we see here in places like Wales and Ireland, remember excluding the one pre-Christian one that doesn’t mention SA and shows the winter solstice. By the time you have widespread literacy, it’s because there’s widespread Christianization. And unsurprisingly, we find New Year’s on January 1st or ... Read more on Catholic.com