Halloween

The origin of "All Hallows’ Eve"
Halloween is celebrated every year on October 31st in the United States and Canada.  But it was not in these traditionally Protestant countries that this holiday first came about, whose name derives from the term "All Hallows’ Eve", which means the Eve of All Saints.

In fact, All Hallows’ Eve and All Saints’ Day, as well as the day after, the Day of the Faithful Departed, are the Christianization of festivals that the Celts celebrated, especially in Scotland and Ireland, many years before the arrival of Christianity in those lands.

Halloween has its origin in an ancient Celtic festival called Samhain, which in Gaelic means summer’s end. The Celts, who lived 2000 years ago in northern France and the Iberian Peninsula, in Scotland and Ireland, celebrated the new year on November 1st. This day marked the end of summer and harvest, the falling of the leaves and the beginning of the dark, cold winter; a time of year that could not fail to be associated with the end of human life, with death.

The Celts believed that on the night of October 31st, their new year’s eve, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead begins to blur and almost disappears; the ghosts of the dead returned to earth and roamed around looking for bodies to inhabit.  As the living did not want to be possessed by spirits, they dressed up in costumes and paraded through the streets, making lots of noise to confuse, frighten and scare away the spirits.

The parade passed through the streets of the village until it reached a large bonfire created by a Druid priest outside the village.  The bonfire was lit primarily to honour the sun god, to thank him for the summer harvest, but it was also a means to ward off the furtive spirits. If a person showed signs of already being possessed by a spirit, he was sacrificed as an example to dissuade other spirits from possessing another human body.

By 43 A.D., the Roman Empire had conquered most of the Celtic territory. During the 400 years they ruled the Celtic lands, the Roman festival known as Feralia, which commemorated the passing of the dead, was combined with this traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain.

In the 8th century, Pope Gregory III designated November 1st to honour all saints and martyrs. And November 2 to honour and pray for the eternal rest of all the faithful departed.  These two festivities incorporated some of the traditions of Samhain. The Church did not manage to Christianize all the traditions and customs of the Celts, and some survived until they were brought to America by the Irish immigrants, who fled the potato famine of 1846.

Halloween today
The Enlightenment, rationalism, the great scientific discoveries of the 19th century and the technological advancement of the 20th century have led to a veritable witch-hunt of superstition. We can say that Western people are generally less superstitious today than they were centuries ago. In this context, Halloween is the day when we laugh at superstitions; and when we laugh at them, we break their spell, and they no longer have any power over us.

In fact, nobody is afraid of the costumes and masks that are paraded on this day, but we would have been scared of them in a different context. Humour dispels the fear, the power, and the placebo and suggestive effect that superstitions have on people; as long as we laugh at superstitions, we do not take them seriously; while we have fun with them, they have no power or effect over us; when we are afraid of them, then yes, they are as powerful as a dog that attack us after sniffing out our fear.

Superstition and faith
Disheartened by the coldness of decades of atheism, and theoretical and practical rationalism, which fought faith as if it were superstition and superstition as if it were faith, many have taken refuge in a new religion called New Age. This New Age is a syncretism, or Russian salad, of the main religions on our planet, associated with all types of superstition, sorcery, and witchcraft.

Very close to us, as an exponent of this type of thinking is the Brazilian writer, Paulo Coelho. The box office success of films like Harry Potter and the series about the occult and vampires can be seen as a reaction to the atheism and materialism that marked the second half of the last century.

The difference between faith and superstition is that faith is reasonable and plausible; there are always reasons that help and support our faith in God and man; everyone who believes has reasons for doing so; superstition, on the other hand, is completely irrational, it is blind faith.

To believe that a black cat is bad luck, and that a rabbit's foot and horseshoe are good luck, is to assume that these material objects have spiritual powers hidden within themselves; this is an irrational belief, because what is material cannot have spiritual power; only a spiritual being can have spiritual power; matter is always matter. God and our neighbour are the only object of our faith. Superstition, on the other hand, has as its object material realities, things, animals and artifacts.

This leads us to reflect on the difference between an icon and an idol. For the superstitious, the black cat, the horseshoe and the rabbit's foot, are idols, because these objects have value in themselves, they are believed to have a spiritual power hidden in them.

An icon, on the other hand, is like an idol, a material object, but it has no value in itself; in fact, its function is to invoke a reality that is beyond itself and transport us to this reality; the wood, carved in a figure of Jesus, has no value in itself but evokes and transports us to the One who does have great value for us; the image is not Christ but represents him.  

Protestant iconoclasts accuse the Catholics of worshipping idols (images of Jesus, Mary and the saints), because they do not know the difference between an idol and an icon.  

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC