Why are our kids (and maybe some of our adults) dressing up like Taylor Swift or Barbie or Spiderman or Harry Potter? “Well,” you may say, “because they’re popular-culture icons.” But why right now? I mean, unless folks were attending a concert, convention, or a movie, no one was wearing costumes last month? “Well,” you will probably say, “because it’s Halloween!” And I will ask, “So what do costumes and Halloween have to do with each other?” Or, to cut to the chase, “What is Halloween all about, anyway?” And what, if anything, does it have to do with the church/Christianity?
Good question! And when we were thinking about our “Family Sunday” observance, I blithely said to our staff, “Let’s make it all about Halloween—in advance. Folks will love seeing kids in costumes . . . and they might like coming in costume!” Then, as fate would have it, in poking around, I learned there was a lot more to it than I thought. I It is about costumes. But it’s also about food. It’s about fear. It’s about death. Like most things in life, it’s . . . complicated. So . . . bear with me; I’m going to get historical.
Our kids dressing up in costumes all starts with the Celts—well before “Celtic Christianity” became a “thing.” The Celts were those peoples who lived in Ireland, much of Great Britain, and a goodly portion of Europe. For them, November 1st was New Year’s Day, NOT January 1. November first marked the end of the summer—the end of the harvest—and, therefore the beginning of winter. Herds came back from pasture; land contracts were renewed. And, so, on the day and night before, on October 31st, the Celts believed that the boundary between the living and the dead became blurred . . . the spirits of the long dead returned to earth, and those recently dead moved to the other world. For them, winter became associated—perhaps not surprisingly—with death. To use the language
coming out of Celtic Christianity, October 31-to-November 1 was a “thin space”—a time or place where this world and the next . . . touched.
Enter the festival of Samhain—the main “ancestor” of our Halloween. At this time, for centuries, the religious leaders of the Celts—the Druids— built huge bonfires, around which the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices. The bonfires and the animal-head and skin costumes worn by many were meant to ward off the ghosts. The Celts re-lit their hearth fires from the sacred bonfires—again, marking the change from the old year to the new. And the Druids took advantage of this “thin time” to make predictions about the future, about health, marriage, and death.
The Celts were mostly conquered in the first century of our era by the Roman legionaries . And, over the next several hundred years, the Romans combined two of their own festivals with Samhain. The first was Feralia, a day in late October commemorating the passing of their dead loved ones. The other was Pomona—a celebration of the Roman goddess of fruit and trees, whose symbol was the apple. The Roman legionaries also brought Christianity to the formerly Celtic lands. Pre-Christian and Christian practices began to overlap. And, traditions passed back and forth across geographical and religious boundaries.
This marriage of Roman and Celtic traditions is seen in another of our Halloween traditions: bobbing for apples! During an annual celebration, young unmarried people would try to bite into an apple floating in water. According to some traditions, the first person to bite into an apple would be the next one to be allowed to marry. In other, perhaps, later traditions, each apple was “assigned” to a particular suitor. Whichever apple the “bobber” snagged would suggest who she or he would marry. And so, apple-bobbing was appropriated into Samhain, with apples a sign of fertility and abundance— good ol’ Pomona—another Halloween custom was born!
At the same time that all of this was going on in Britain, back in more southerly Europe and Asia Minor, Christians had been celebrating, and venerating, the early martyrs who had died for their faith. The anniversaries of their deaths were commemorated; their graves and burial
sites became the focus of veneration and pilgrimage. And soon, the practice spread beyond martyrs who’d died during the pre-Constantinian persecutions to include individuals who had led particular righteous and holy lives.
These hallowed dead received a special boost when, in the early 7th century, the Emperor gave the Pantheon—that Roman temple dedicated to the gods—to the Church. On May 13, 609, Pope Boniface had the statues of Jupiter and the others taken out, and he dedicated the building to the Virgin Mary and all the Martyrs. Why May 13th? That corresponded with a Roman—i.e., pagan—festival called Lemuria—a time when Romans performed rituals to exorcise ghosts of the restless dead from homes! As has happened throughout history, one religion co-opts the festivals and rites of another to make conversion to the newer religion .
About a hundred years later, another Pope, Gregory III, dedicated a chapel in St. Peter’s Basilica to all the saints on November 1. By 800, the Christians in Ireland (!), Northumbria and Bavaria were celebrating All Saints Day on November 1st. And in 835, it became Holy Day of Obligation in the Frankish Empire—that is, a day when very Christian ought go to Mass. Within 300 years, the association of All Saints with May 13th was gone; November 1—along with all of its religious and secular trappings having to with the dead—officially became All Saints’ Day.
All Saints’ Day celebrated those individuals who had died fully in a “state of grace”—individuals like martyrs and perpetual virgins. But what of the rest of us—faithful Christians who live ordinary lives? According to medieval Catholic theology, our destination was . . . Purgatory . . . where we could be cleansed of our sins/faults so that we might receive the beatific vision, and enter heaven.
This ignoring of the “rest of us” didn’t go un-noticed. And, in the 11th century Odilo, the Abbot of the Benedictine Monastery of Cluny, declared that on November 2nd, all the Faithful Departed be recognized. And, within a couple of hundred years, the feast of All Souls had become practically universal.
I’m sure you’re asking by now (if you’re still awake), “What does that have to do with us, our kids in costumes, and Barbie and Harry
Potter?” All of these traditions came to America with the colonists, And, despite the best efforts of our Puritan ancestors, the traditions of Halloween were hard to root out. And, later, with significant Scottish and Irish immigration, many other practices arrived as well, such as trick-or-treating (having developed from a practice of requesting prayers in exchange for a “soul-cake) and Jack o’ Lanterns (originally a carved turnip—either to ward off evil spirits, or to resemble them).
All of these traditions reflect how we deal with some of our basic human questions, our hopes and fears about death and dying . . . and the state of those who’ve gone on. Certainly, I could spend a lot of time on other cultures’ traditions/beliefs about this. Many of us, for example, are aware of Dia de los muertos—the Day of the Dead: a joy-filled Mexican celebration combining pre-Christian with Christian beliefs about the “thin space” between now and the afterlife. But for us—especially in the Episcopal Church, with our particular heritage, we have these three days this-coming week—all dedicated in one way or another to the dead. Halloween, All Saints’, and All Souls’. We mark them in various ways, from fun to solemn. But together they all testify to the ongoing spiritual bond between the church triumphant—that is, those who have died, and the church militant—those of us here. That bond is what we confess in both the Apostle’s and Nicene Creed: the“thin space” or “thin time” that is the “communion of the saints”.
Amen.