Halloween: Syncretism and Haunted Fundamentalism
Syncretism is the blending of systems of beliefs or customs. Exclusivist religions that claim divine revelation condemn syncretism as a watering down of truth, but blending is a fact of life. Day-to-day patterns of behavior melt together where cultures touch. Centuries-old holidays and customs have forgotten origins that may be foreign to the way they are understood today.
Syncretism is especially inevitable in mass conversions. When Christianity, originally a messianic offshoot of Judaism, took over the Roman Empire in the 4th and 5th centuries, pagans converted en masse. It was simple for pagans to accept belief in one supreme God (Plato did that centuries earlier), and the Jesus story resembled the myths of Orpheus and Hercules. Pagans needed only modify a few conscious beliefs floating like oil on the surface of their deeper communal assumptions while the bulk of the old faith remained in place.
Temples were retrofitted as churches, idols replaced by crucifixes. The patron old gods, already understood by philosophers as subordinate to the One, became patron saints and guardian angels. Pilgrimages to the temples of gods became pilgrimages to the relics of martyrs. The dark god of Manichaean dualism became Satan. The mother goddess became Mary. Rejected gods became devils, their priests, witches and warlocks. Ancient blood rituals of eating sacrificed flesh became the eucharist. Ancient Christianity remained polytheistic in the pagan sense of god ("an immortal being with superhuman powers"), its world thronged with lesser powers: angels, ghosts, saints, and devils. In the sense that Roman emperors were gods, their souls immortal, Christianity made every believer a god.
In the early Church, a festival for martyred saints was held on May 13, 609, after Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Roman Pantheon to "Saint Mary and all martyrs." This is same date as Lemuria, an ancient Roman festival in which dangerous spirits of the dead were appeased. The date for honoring all saints and martyrs fluctuated until 837, when Pope Gregory IV established November 1 as All Saints' Day (called All Hallows' in medieval England). All Hallows' Evening, October 31 was shortened to Halloween.
All Saints' coincided with the pre-Christian Celtic New Year called Samhain. It marked the end of the harvest and the onset of winter, when cattle were driven down from summer pastures in the hills. The Samhain celebration began with bonfires on the night of October 31, which was regarded as a thinning of the boundaries of the Other World when fairies and the restless dead haunted the night. Costumed people with masked or sooted faces went from house to house reciting verses and begging food, impersonated the spirits believed to be abroad. Their costumes were supposed either to frighten evil spirits away or to pass among them in disguise, and food given was supposed to propitiate the spirits. These guisers often carried candles in a hollowed-out turnips carved like faces and used their anonymity to play pranks, especially if houses withheld food. This custom, now called trick-or-treating, has spread over Europe and North America, driven by commercialism.
Halloween wasn't important in the United States until well into the 19th century, a time of mass Celtic immigration. It had been rejected by Puritans (along with Christmas), not because it was pagan, but because it was Christian--a Catholic holy day. The term trick or treat isn't attested until 1927, and Halloween didn't compete with Easter and Christmas until later in the century. It is religious in that there are vigil masses, but today Halloween is even more secularized and commercialized than Christmas, its religious significance shrunken to a footnote. But, as the night before the ceremonial rising up of the saints, this significance is easy to reconstruct.
The spirits that walk abroad in the darkness before the dawn of the saints are, take your choice, pagan gods, demons, or the restless dead. As the last darkness before the dawn of the saints, All Hallows' Eve is the dark forces' last hurrah, a liminal time when they approach the living but are driven back to their proper place. It is the ritual darkness before the dawn. It recapitulates the process between 300 and 500 CE when worshippers of the old pagan gods--identified with witches and demons by Roman Christians--fell before Christ and his saints. Of course, the secular can participate as well by symbolizing the forces of darkness falling before light. Halloween may not so much exercise evil, as its haters claim, as exorcize of it.
A web-search of "Halloween" and "occult" brings up posts, Catholic and Protestant, that describe Halloween as a Satanic. The most persistent objection is to its syncretistic roots in Samhain, but most Christian practice is also syncretistic. Church architecture is derived from pagan temples, not apostolic "house churches," and even the word God signified warriors in Valhalla. Christmas practices are entangled with early pagan ones--evergreens, fires, feasting, caroling, gift-giving, and a magic flying gift-giver, not to mention its celebration at the solstice, the time of the Germanic Yule and the Roman festival of Sol Invictus. Except for creches, prayers, and gospel readings, almost everything Christmas is a legacy of ancient solar festivals. But symbols are mutable--if context changes, meaning changes--and there's nothing Satanic in adapting imagery of the rising sun to the risen son. Syncretism isn't paganism.
Anti-Halloween Christians call Halloween occult, a term meaning hidden used to describe supernatural practices not part of the speaker's preferred religion. Halloween's occult nature, despite being a Christian holiday, is "proven" with the fallacy of guilt by association. "Pre-Christians did X while worshipping; therefore, X is devil worship." And it's also somehow supposed to be damning that contemporary pagans continue to worship on the eve of All-Saints'. But unless a substantive connection can be made--unless trick-or-treaters, for instance, are shown to be calling up demons--this does not follow any more than that I am a Nazi because I've ridden in a jet plane with design features developed in WWII Germany.
Occultism is defined in both Catholic and Protestant web posts in terms alien to any Halloween celebration I've ever been to. Occultism is said to involve the "desire to have power and control like God" and employ "astrology, magic, spells, enchantments, charms, sorcery, wizardry, witchcraft, divination, fortune-telling, mediums, spiritism, necromancy, familiar spirits, seances, channeling, clairvoyance, and spirit-guides." These may be occult practices, but in seventy years of Halloween parties or trick-or-treating, I've never practiced them. Two posts quote Leviticus 19 to make the claim that practicing witchcraft, interpreting omens, casting spells, and calling up the dead are practices on which Halloween (All Saints' Eve) is based, which makes sense only with the false logic of identifying a thing's "true" nature with its nature at a much earlier time. If Halloween is the same as Samhain, then there are thirteen states and I'm a baby.
All of this leaves me shaking my head. I stand with the 30 percent of Americans (according to a recent Gallup Poll) who don't believe in the Devil. I do accept the traditional figure as a personification of the worst human desire. And in a way I understand where the fundamentalists are coming from. In a world where devils and angels were real humanoid spirits--armed, superhuman, dangerous, and sporting gang colors--I might be freaked out by Halloween too. But my spirituality avoids violent mythology. My world is less a battlefield of ether/or than a cityscape of both/and.
References
Dinkins, Tim. "Christ and Common Sense: The Dark Side of Halloween."https://hanfordsentinel.com/features/local/christ-and-common-sense-the-dark-side-of-halloween/article_598469eb-892a-55f2-80ef-f5f12da6e7d6.html
Gallup Poll. "Americans More Likely to Believe in God than the Devil, Heaven More than Hell." https://news.gallup.com/poll/27877/americans-more-likely-believe-god-than-devil-heaven-more-than-hell.aspx
Gault, Matthew. "Use This Spell to Bind Trump and His Cronies." https://medium.com/defiant/use-this-spell-to-bind-trump-and-his-cronies-a5b6298f5c69
GoodFight Ministries. "Halloween: A Satanic Holiday. "https://www.goodfight.org/articles/cults-occult/halloween-satanic-holiday/
GoodFight Ministries. "A Christian Response to Halloween. "https://www.goodfight.org/articles/cults-occult/christian-response-halloween/
Marcellino, Kathryn. Halloween, Witches, Demons, and the Occult. https://spiritualdirection.com/2011/09/22/halloween-witches-demons-and-the-occult
Pat Welch Family. "The Occult and Halloween." https://myemail.constantcontact.com/NL--595---The-Occult---Halloween.html?soid=1101229843312&aid=RTC9fu5APhU
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