A return to a spirited age
It’s customary at this time of year for idle parents to moan about Hallowe’en. Most of us see it as a tacky American imposition, a commercialisation of an old pagan ritual. It’s also a lot of effort: all that carving out of pumpkins.
But we adults can learn to love it. It’s just a question of getting in touch with Merry England. For in fact Hallowe’en is not American or pagan in origin, but rather it is a medieval idea. The Eve of Hallowtide is the night before two consecutive medieval feast days, those of All Saints and All Souls.
On All Saints, or All Hallows, we used to remember all the Christian saints, hallow being an old English form for holy man, and All Souls was an affair where we remembered our own dead friends and relatives and prayed that their souls would get from Purgatory to Heaven. We also rang bells to hasten the upward progress of such lost souls.
These notions smacked of superstition to the Protestant reformers of the 16th century, and the feasts of Hallowtide, along with every other enjoyable feature of medieval Christianity, such as maypoles, bright colours, a belief in Purgatory, incense, bell-ringing, sex in the woods and polyphonic choirs, were banned in the Reformation.
Hallowe’en’s modern form, in which children wander from house to house dressed as ghosts or witches, extracting sweeties and biscuits from neighbours, seems to have begun in the Thirties in Britain and the US.
It is a conflation of the medieval custom of “souling” and the 19th-century invention of Mischief Night. Like wassailing, souling was the practice of groups of people, not just children, who would sing songs outside people’s houses and await small gifts of food or money in return. Mischief Night, which took place on different days according to local custom, was a night for pranks and japes.
The central element of Hallowe’en, though, and one I think we should support, is communion with the spirit world. Dressing up as ghosts and ghoulies surely recalls the original purpose of remembering the dead.
In Mexico, November 1 and 2 are for celebrating the Day of the Dead, when people decorate the gravestones of relatives and have little chats with them. The pumpkin makes an appearance: it is candied and the resulting confection is known as pan de muerto, or “bread of the dead”.
The dominant symbol of the festival is the skull. In a Hallowe’en-type touch, in some areas of the country, children approach strangers and ask for gifts. The festival is also marked by feasting and dancing.
I wonder if Hallowe’en popped up in America as a result of the Mexican influence there. If so, it has gone full circle, from medieval Spain to South America via Cortez, from South America to North America and then back to Europe again.
Well, clearly the children enjoy dressing up and being scary. For a night, they become lost souls, wailing and hoping to find their way from Purgatory to Heaven. Hallowe’en is our own Day of the Dead, or Eve of the Day of the Dead. So to celebrate Hallowe’en properly, November 1 and 2 should be declared public holidays.
Actually, don’t wait for an authority to give you the days off – take them off anyway. Surely if you declare yourself to be a pre-Reformation Christian, your workplace would, for PC reasons, be obliged to respect your faith?
Doesn’t pre-Reformation Christianity have as much right to declare itself as a recognised religion as Hindusim, Buddhism, Judaism or Islam? And for all its faults, one of the excellent features of European Christianity before 1535 was that it guaranteed us a hell of a lot of days off work.
Also, we need to dance and sing in the graveyards, feast heartily, eat candied pumpkin and put on skull masks, play tricks on our elders and do everything we can to shock the Protestant clergy.
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If only we do what we preach here.