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Holidays/vacations
Paganism
6 min read

A brief history of Halloween

Our obsession with pumpkins and ghosts reveals a lot about us

Theodore is author of the historical fiction series The Wanderer Chronicles. He previously studied Dark Age archaeology at Cambridge, and afterwards worked in international law.

pumpkin between lighted candles

As summer withers into autumn, these days you can’t escape the impression that Halloween is taking over.

Like Christmas or Mother’s Day, the run-in to Halloween seems to project further backwards from the actual date of its celebration - 31st October - with each passing year.

I am especially conscious of this as a parent. Weeks before the actual “event”, the kids start coming home from school with all manner of Halloween arts and craft detritus, poems, storybooks and spelling tests (no pun intended). Costumes are dug out for special Halloween dress-up days. The kitchen is covered in pumpkin pulp and paint – which is fine. (I’m less keen on the vampire blood dripping off my eight-year-old’s chin.)

In the supermarkets and department stores, the black and orange decking appears. Cobwebs materialise in the shop windows with a speed and intensity which any arachnid would envy. Movie billboards on passing buses take a turn for the infernal; Netflix algorithms become decidedly witchy. Everywhere you look, your eye is met with devil horns and the baleful glare of demons.

No doubt commercially it’s a great money-spinner. But what does it say about the prevailing currents of our culture?

Our obsession with this holiday - or at least someone’s obsession with this holiday - apparently knows no end. But why?

No doubt commercially it’s a great money-spinner. But can we read anything more into this growing obsession with Halloween? What does it say about the prevailing currents of our culture?

In the British Isles, at least, the tradition of a celebration marking the end of the harvest season finds its origin in the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced ‘Sow-in’). The Celts, who populated what is now Ireland, Great Britain, and parts of Northern France, celebrated their new year from sunset on October 31st to sunset on November 1st. (Would that ours were so neatly packaged.)

Samhain marked the end of harvest and the start of winter, a time when the days grew shorter and colder. It was viewed as the transition from the light, fertile half of the year to the dark, barren half. But more than this, Samhain was believed to be a time when the boundary between the physical world and the spirit world was thinnest, allowing spirits (both good and bad) to pass through. Thus, it was a time for honouring ancestors and the dead, who were thought to return to their homes seeking hospitality. This ‘thinning of the veil’ also meant the increased presence of otherworldly beings like faeries (or worse), which could cause harm if not appeased. Offerings of food and drink were left out to ensure peace with them, too.

Some of the ways in which the festival of Samhain were held will be familiar to us today: large communal bonfires were lit (long before Guy Fawkes appeared on the scene); feasts were held in honour of ancestors; fortune-telling and divination were considered especially effective at this time; some traditions involved donning disguises and costumes in order to ward off and confuse harmful spirits; small food offerings were left out to placate wandering spirits. Livestock were often slaughtered ahead of the coming winter.

With the slow but inexorable conversion and Christianisation of the peoples of Britain from the late Roman period of the third and fourth centuries on into the early medieval period, this pagan festival marking the transition in the year from light to darkness evolved. Like many aspects of a pre-existing pagan culture, the festival of Samhain, under the influence of the Christian faith, was not expunged but rather, in the church’s eyes anyway, redeemed. In other words, the paganism of the British Isles was not so much swept away as swallowed up, and then re-constituted into something more overtly Christian, but with pre-existing cultural undertones still there.

So, Samhain became All Hallows’ Day or All Saints’ Day, celebrated on November 1st, which honours all the saints, both known and unknown, who have attained heaven. The first recorded evidence of its celebration in the West was in Rome in the early seventh century. By the mid-eighth century, it had spread to most of the Western Christian tradition. It provided a kind of catch-all celebration for the sainted dead, marked by special readings and prayers, and often the lighting of candles at gravesites or in churches, honouring deceased loved ones and saints. In terms of teaching, All Hallows’ Day emphasises the Christian belief in the communion of saints – the spiritual union of the living and the dead in Christ. You can see, perhaps, the same “thinness” of the veil between their otherwise separate worlds marked there.

G.K. Chesterton used to argue that, paradoxically, the most pagan thing still in the world is the Christian church. He understood that in the West at least, all of paganism - the awe and mystery which pagans once held towards the natural world - has been rolled up and retained in the traditions and rituals of the church. The festival of Halloween, for a long time anyway, seemed a particularly obvious case in point.

However, there is no doubt that in more recent decades, with the general waning of Christian faith and advance of secularism - at least in our outward expressions of culture, if not necessarily the inner convictions of our hearts – the surface veneer of Christian faith has rather sloughed off this festival of Halloween. And what we are left with is something more overtly pagan, and certainly more sinister.

Could it be the apparently ceaseless proliferation of this ancient festival has something altogether more chilling to say about our culture?

In his book Heretics, Chesterton had already envisaged what we are now seeing in our culture a hundred years after he wrote it. He wasn’t too worried. “If we revive and pursue the pagan ideal of a simple and rational self-completion, we shall end where Paganism ended. I do not mean that we shall end in destruction. I mean that we shall end in Christianity." In other words, if society returns to pagan ideals, he was sure it will eventually lead back to Christianity because of the deep moral discoveries and spiritual truths that Christianity offers.

On the other hand, I am not so sure. Historically, what has once been a pagan culture that is rolled up into a Christian one does not revert to that same naïve, even “innocent” form of paganism when Christianity is discarded later on. Rather, the spiritual mood becomes post-Christian. Even Anti-Christian, re-creating a form of paganism as appropriated and adapted by the spirit of anti-Christ. That seems closer to the mark, especially when you notice the number of inverted crosses appearing on the doors of the more enthusiastic Halloween celebrants on the street.

So could it be the apparently ceaseless proliferation of this ancient festival has something altogether more chilling to say about our culture? In Jesus’ own words: “And this is the judgement of the world: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil.”

Even if this might be nearer to the truth, the claim of Christ has always been one of hope: where there is death and darkness, so must follow resurrection and light. And at this time of year, it is perhaps to our profit to remember one of the most beautiful passages about light and darkness ever penned: “In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

Worth remembering, too, however scary we make our pumpkin, we are still moved to fill it with light.

So, let’s not be too gloomy.

After all, Christmas is coming.

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Grenfell disaster
Justice
4 min read

Grenfell – what should happen now?

Six urgent priorities that should follow the Inquiry

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A tube train runs on a raised track, in the distance is a tower block wrapped in white material with a green heart on it.

I remember standing at the base of Grenfell Tower on the morning of the 14th June 2017, talking with firefighters, gathering clergy to act as emergency volunteers, praying with evacuees from the surrounding blocks, as the building still smouldered. At the time the question on everyone’s lips was: how could something like this happen in sophisticated twenty-first century Britain? 

Now we know. 

In one sense the Public Inquiry into the Grenfell tower fire told us nothing new. Few people who have followed the Inquiry over the last six years will have been surprised by its conclusions. What is new is to see the dreadful catalogue of ‘incompetence dishonesty and greed’ laid out in excoriating detail for all to see. 

So what should happen now? At least six things must be on the agenda: 

  1. Combustible cladding on remaining buildings around the country should be removed as soon as possible. Government estimates suggest there are 4,600 buildings around the country with unsafe cladding. Less than one third of them have had their remediation completed, and work is yet to start on half of them. And, astonishing as it may sound, this is now more than seven years after Grenfell. Cladding that is illegal on new buildings can still remain on existing ones. Developers and owners who are responsible for this state of affairs should be made to pay for the remediation rather than passing those costs on to leaseholders, or delaying remediation for technical and bureaucratic reasons. Institutional resistance to this, as outlined recently by Michael Gove, someone who from my dealing with him on Grenfell, was one of the better politicians to deal with this issue, has to be overcome with urgency. 

  2. Prosecution of those who have been identified in the inquiry as bearing responsibility for the fire should also be brought as soon as possible. The police investigation suggests that it will be a number of years before court cases take place. The victims of this tragedy have already had to wait seven long years and now face the prospect of another three or even more years until justice is served. That is too long.  

  3. Those named and shamed in the report should examine their own hearts. Some remorse and apology has been evident from some, but not enough. Many still deny responsibility despite seven years of evidence-gathering. This is not a matter of revenge, but an indispensable step towards justice for everyone. Those named have presumably carried a burden of guilt over these past years. The Christian doctrine of repentance, confession and absolution tells us that there is a relief in finally admitting culpability, bearing the penalty, and finally, once all this has happened, receiving a measure of absolution.  

We might look back on Grenfell as a turning point in our life together: a fitting memorial for those who tragically died on that terrible night. 

  1. The companies involved often have big pockets and the bereaved and survivors are ordinary people without the resources to pay expensive legal fees. The government should set aside a sum of money to enable victims, if they wish, to bring a civil case against those accused in the report. Arguably this should have happened many years before to speed up the process of justice.  

  2. A wider debate needs to take place in our society as to how we place love for neighbour at the heart of national life. A libertarian individualism which focusses on personal fulfilment and a view of freedom as doing what we like as long as we don’t harm others, rather than freedom to do the good has led us to this point. What would it mean in company law, for example, for each business or institution to have to explain how it is seeking the genuine welfare of its staff, clients and customers, not as an add on in their ESG agenda, but as the primary purpose of the organisation?  

  3. We need a spiritual renewal. Toleration rather than persecution of the neighbour was a good legacy of the Enlightenment, but it is not enough to build a well-functioning society. We are commanded not just to tolerate our neighbours but to love them. And this only be justified if my neighbour has ultimate transcendent value. The new atheism was an act of cultural vandalism, undermining faith in God, an objective basis for each human life, and having nothing to replace it with. As Nick Cave recently put it: “People need meaning. And secular society has not come up with the goods.” This is why religious traditions including Christianity have tended to link love for God to love for neighbour. What that spiritual renewal looks like is hard to tell, and yet we have perhaps seen a stirring of it in recent times.  

If something approaching those six things happened, then we might look back on Grenfell as a turning point in our life together: a fitting memorial for those who tragically died on that terrible night.