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Paganism

28 October 2024

6 min read

A brief history of Halloween

Our obsession with pumpkins and ghosts reveals a lot about us

Theodore Brun

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.

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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Politics

8 November 2024

10 min read

How to respond when politicians talk about “our way of life”

Alasdair MacIntyre’s thinking helps us understand what we share across society.

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

Four men in suits, sit next to each other smiling, in the House of Commons.

Reform MPs in the House of Commons.

House of Commons, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia.

What is “our way of life”? It’s a phrase which slides easily into the rhetoric of politicians of every stripe. It’s what the Reform Party says is threatened by multiculturalism, but what do they mean by it? What kind of politics is sustained by talk of “our way of life” and is there a better way of thinking about such politics?

This summer, we made an exception to the time limit rule for television in my house, mainly so that I could have the Olympics on from morning to night. It’s a habit I acquired growing up in the United States, where an obsession over the quadrennial medal count is one of the few remaining things which bridges political and regional divides. During the Cold War, the Olympics were a way for Americans to proudly affirm the superiority of our way of life over the rigid training schedules and alien ways of the rival Soviet Union.

Although my memories begin around the fall of the Berlin Wall, old habits die hard, and so the Olympics, to me, was endless coverage of plucky underdog Americans overcoming the odds to defeat the machine-like discipline of a new set of rivals–now Russia and China

I moved to Britain just before the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics at which Britain won exactly one medal. At first I was bemused by the BBC’s coverage, which, of necessity, had to focus on British Olympians with little chance of winning. I was invited to cheer on eighth or ninth place finishers who had committed their life to a craft which would never bring the rewards of lasting fame or financial security. For them the reward was the Olympics themselves, the chance to compete amongst peers, to push themselves to their highest level, enjoying their sport and their performance for what it was, not for any external reward. In the terms of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, what these Olympians displayed was dedication to the internal goods of their sport–those goods that make a particular activity worth doing for its own sake. The Olympics were not about medals for them, but about showing what could be achieved if, as Olympians must do, they made their sport their way of life, dedicating themselves to its unique forms of excellence.

Sports, for MacIntyre, are but one example of a broader category he labels ‘practices’. Although MacIntyre has a technical definition of what counts as a ‘practice’, the general idea can be conveyed through examples he gives such as farming, researching history, architecture, chess, and chemistry. Practices are human activities which are worth doing for their own sake, which require a degree of skill and excellence, and in which what counts as that skill and excellence is, in part, defined and discerned by the people who participate in the practice. This last criterion points at something important about practices for MacIntyre: they are inherently social.

This is obvious in the case of sport. For an individual athlete to compete in a race they need not just other competitors to race against, but also trainers and coaches to prepare them for it, governing bodies to organise it, and, hopefully, spectators to cheer them on. It is, perhaps, less obvious in the case of individual farmer, but even here, one has to be taught to farm and, if one is wise, continues to learn and adapt through consulting with other farmers. A different way of putting this is that practices are the kinds of things which it’s not absurd to call “a way of life”. For an Olympic curler, curling is a way of life, just as much as farming is for a farmer.

There are many ways of life, many modes of being British, as diverse as the professions, hobbies, and passions which we find to have inherent worth.

However, this seems to offer little help in defining “our way of life” if it is being used in the way our politicians like to talk about it. If there’s one thing that I learned from all those BBC features of British Olympians way back in 2010, it was that aside from geographic proximity, there was not much that their way of life had in common with mine. I may be within driving distance of the rink where Winter Olympian Eve Muirhead learned to curl, but my workdays of wrestling spreadsheets and answering emails have little in common with ones spent lifting weights, studying strategy with coaches, and perfecting the just right spin on a stone as it’s released.

And, of course that’s not just true of Olympic athletes. The investment banker who attends our church shares a way of life with his colleagues in Edinburgh, London, and Tokyo, that is completely opaque to my wife and I, immersed as we are in the worlds of ministry and academia. I glimpse some of the internal goods of the practices of our dentist watching her check my daughters’ teeth and our plumber as he fixes our leaking radiators, but their way of life, the rhythms of their days, and what gives them satisfaction in their work as they move from appointment to appointment, eludes my understanding.

Where does this leave the search for a British way of life? If practices are as important to forming us as MacIntyre thinks, then the quest for any singular British way of life will ultimately be fruitless. There are many ways of life, many modes of being British, as diverse as the professions, hobbies, and passions which we find to have inherent worth. And even this characterisation does not go quite far enough, because all of these practices have a way of bursting the boundaries of Britishness if they really are worthwhile. A century and a half ago, football, rugby, and cricket were quintessentially British sports. Now they belong to the world.

Similarly, valuing these practices well within Britain has a tendency to open us to accepting those from outside our borders who can help develop them. The best footballer in Britain is Norwegian. Many of the doctors who ensured my daughters arrived safely after complicated pregnancies were originally from India and Pakistan.

Still, one might wonder if thinking about community through the lens of practices, as MacIntyre does, is too much of a solvent. Isn’t it a way of imagining us living near each other, but not with each other; siloed in our practices, in each of our communities, not understanding what our neighbours are up to? Not necessarily. For MacIntyre, the familiarity that arise from living near someone, hearing their worries at planning permission hearings, arguing with them at the local school’s parent council meetings, organising a community fundraiser together, or, even, being part of a family with them, can help develop an understanding of the internal goods of practices which we do not take part in. I haven’t lifted a brush to paper to since my secondary school art class, but my mother-in-law’s virtuosity with acrylics has led me to acquire an increasing appreciation for painting. Part of what helps facilitate this recognition is that, as MacIntyre argues, although the internal goods and the skills required to achieve them tend to be different for each practice, the virtues which we develop while pursuing them–patience, honesty, courage, self-control–are universal. Part of what helps us recognise others’ activities as practices, as worth doing for their own sake, are the virtues we see them develop as they do them.

This sort of recognition requires familiarity, the sort I might have with my neighbours in our corner of rural Aberdeenshire, but that I am unlikely to have with fellow citizens in Cornwall, Cardiff, London, or Glasgow. How then are we to respond to national politicians talking about “our way of life”? One answer might be: with extreme scepticism. This is MacIntyre’s approach. He rejects the nation-state, which he calls “a dangerous and unmanageable institution”, as a potential channel of communal unity. Instead, he calls on us to admit that modern nation-states exist as a contradiction, being both “a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services” and yet also something treated as sacred, which we are asked, on occasion, to surrender our lives to preserve. He notes with characteristic acerbity, “it is like being asked to die for the telephone company.”

However, here I’d temper MacIntyre’s rhetoric somewhat. While my attachment to bankers in Canary Wharf is largely a happenstance of history, a contingent fact generated by long forgotten necessities of eighteenth century geopolitics, it has nevertheless resulted in both of us being issued the same passport, governed by the same tax regime, and having the same set of regulatory agencies to complain to when things go wrong. Those may be manifestations of what MacIntyre disparages as “a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services”, but they nevertheless do bind us together. As such we both have an interest in making sure this bureaucracy acts as justly as it can, not because it is the embodiment of all that is British, Britain is much too diverse and interesting to be fully embodied in our political institutions, but because we all have an interest in the institutions in which we are enmeshed, British or otherwise, being run as justly as possible.

Surely politics is all about securing as much money and resources as possible for the people most like oneself. That, it seems, is often the unstated assumption when the talk of “our way of life”

Because we find ourselves tied together by these institutions to a diverse collection of people, we have an interest in learning about those with whom we live. Even those who are far away. And to also celebrate when goods and services delivered by our institutions result in success to which we, in a remote way, have contributed. I may not share a way of life with Adam Peaty, but, thanks to the BBC, I can have a glimpse into what his way of life is and can be happy that through my taxes I have contributed, in a small way, to helping him win another medal. Since that 2010 Winter Olympics Britain has come quite a long way and there is nothing wrong with a little vicarious pride in our athlete’s accomplishments.

But I can also be proud of athletes who didn’t win. Ones like BMX rider Beth Shriever who handled her unexpected last place finish in her final with a kind of grace and maturity, the kind of virtue, which someone more dedicated to her practice than to just winning can demonstrate. It is the facilitating of this kind of moral achievement which is more valuable than any medal.

Similarly, I can rejoice when a new hospital gets built in a neglected area in London, or more council housing is supplied to people in need in Edinburgh, hopeful that these lead to my fellow citizens achieving the kind of flourishing lives they deserve. I can be angry, when I discover that the money I’ve paid towards postage has been used to prosecute innocent victims of a computer glitch, and pleased when the opening of a new rail line eases the otherwise stressful commute of tens of thousands in London. The state may be a bit like a telephone company, but a well-run utility can do a lot to supply people with the goods they need to make their lives. As long as I’m a subscriber, as long as I’m tied to people through national institutions like the state, I have a moral duty to ensure that they’re run as well as possible.

This way of thinking about politics may strike some as idealistic, the kind of view only a naive Christian ethicist could endorse. Surely politics is all about securing as much money and resources as possible for the people most like oneself. That, it seems, is often the unstated assumption when the talk of “our way of life” is deployed and why so much coalition building in our politics turns on finding a convenient other against which to define “our” similarity. Take your pick: immigrants, the EU, woke elites, the Tories, or Westminster (among a certain brand of politician here in Scotland).--. Growing up in the USA, the Soviets, and then the Chinese, and now, depending whether one lives in a Republican or Democratic district, the other political party, have served the same purpose. The problem is that we aren’t that similar, we are and always have been a diverse lot with diverse needs. Every nation is. There is no one British way of life and to allow our politicians to try to sustain the fiction that there is lets them off the hook. Solving deep seated economic and social inequality is hard. Blaming immigrants for not embracing our way of life is easy.

So, perhaps the sort of politics that I am talking about here is idealistic, nevertheless it is the only kind that can sustain a just government in the long term. Without acknowledging the importance of goods we only partly understand which are pursued by people whose ways of life are different from our own, we cannot hope to sustain the minor miracle of coordination and mutual aid that history has gifted us with in our united kingdom.