Celebrating
Superstition: Why Halloween is a Beautiful Thing
As opposed to I am to superstition and the
like, you might wonder how I resolve my beliefs with my love for
Halloween. For a great read about a rational perspective on
Halloween (as opposed to the types who burn Harry Potter book in church
parking lots), see the following article which sums up one more reason
why this is my favorite holiday and exactly why you should be giving
out candy on Halloween night*.
(*If you aren't giving out candy at your own place, feel free to come
over and give out some with us. We'll have our costumes on and
you'll get to see the yard decorated before it all gets pulled down the
next day.)
The following article by Aimee
Romero appeared at the now-defunct
Freethoughforum.org in 2006 and was published in American Atheist in 2007.
Celebrating
Superstition: Why Halloween is a Beautiful Thing
by Aimee Romero
Sunday, October 29, 2006
All Hallows Eve… a chilly autumn night set aside for children to
dress up like ghouls and superheroes and take to the streets to gather
goodies from generous neighbors. It's a night for adults to
recapture the imagination and silliness of childhood and dress up in
tasteless and provocative outfits too thoroughly inappropriate for any
other day of the year. Jack-o-lanterns, cobwebs, and candy corn
(one of the few candies designated for consumption only once a year,
other than those Easter-only marshmallowy chickens called
“Peeps”) audio cassettes of screeching sounds and black
lights shining down on inviting front porches… it's the exact
same scene every 31st of October. There's one religious holiday
on the calendar that I truly enjoy, and that's Halloween.
The ancient, superstitious origins of Halloween date back thousands of
years. The History Channel shares a brief history of the autumn
festival:
Celtic
festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in).
The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago in
the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom, and northern France,
celebrated their new year on November 1. This day marked the end
of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a
time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts
believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between
the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the
night of October 31, they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that
the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. In addition to causing
trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence of the
otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests,
to make predictions about the future. For a people entirely
dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were an
important source of comfort and direction during the long, dark winter.
By the 800s, Catholicism had spread throughout Europe, and Pope
Boniface IV decided to replace the Celtic festival with a
church-sanctioned holiday called “All Saints Day,” a time
to honor dead saints and church martyrs. Two centuries later,
another Catholic holiday appeared called “All Souls Day,” a
time to honor the dead with a celebration virtually identical to the
traditional Samhain. Nice try Pope, but apparently our ancestors
liked their bonfires and costume parties just the way they were, and
the custom survived the attempted cultural hijacking. Not even
the church could steal our favorite ghoulish event.
Over the years, Halloween has taken some interesting cultural spins
like “Punkie Night” celebrated in Somerset, England, and
Dia de Los Muertos celebrated in Mexico, which was originally an Aztec
tradition that was co-opted by the Catholic Church (All Souls Day) and
has since evolved into a Mexican version of Halloween.
Of course, despite Halloween's longevity and culturally-diverse appeal,
not everyone's a fan of the festival of ghosts and goblins. Some
superstitious folks are dodgy about celebrating what they think is real
“evil” and don't seem to get that the secular celebration
of this ancient festival is just all in good fun. Wikipedia has a
bit about how some conservative religionists shy away from the party.
The
majority of Christians ascribe no doctrinal significance to Halloween,
treating it as a purely secular entity devoted to celebrating imaginary
spooks and handing out candy. The secular celebration of
Halloween may loom larger in contemporary imagination than does All
Saints Day.
The mingling of Christian and Pagan
traditions in the development of Halloween, and its assumed
preoccupation with evil and the supernatural, have left some modern
Christians uncertain of how they should react towards the
holiday. Certain fundamentalist and evangelical Protestants,
along with some Eastern Orthodox Christians as well as conservative
Jews and Muslims, strongly object to the holiday and refuse to allow
their children to participate, citing its pagan origins (and, in some
cases, its Roman Catholic connections) as well as what they regard as
its Satanic imagery.
It's too bad that those kids have to miss out, but it brings me back to
my original point: why is Halloween such a wonderful religious holiday?
The reason is simple: because we don't believe in it anymore. We
keep the tradition because it's beautiful. We honor an ancient
tribal people whose lives must have been so difficult and that which
they didn't know so terrifying that the only answers they had were
based on superstition. Two millennia later, we know that evil
spirits do not destroy crops. We know now that ghosts of the dead
do not terrorize us on this night because the moon appears to be the
same size as the sun. We know these myths were just a way for
primitive people to better cope with the fact that there was so much
about the universe that they didn't understand. That's all
religion has ever been: just made-up answers to the questions of the
world. Halloween really is a celebration of the human spirit; a
recognition of our ancestry and our pursuit of knowledge and
understanding of the world around us.
The secularization of ancient religious holidays has already begun in
many parts of the world. We celebrate secular versions of
holidays like Christmas and Easter just as we do Halloween, purely for
our own childhood nostalgia, a sense of community and the beauty and
imagination the festivities have sparked throughout history. For
freethinkers, the birth of a god from a virgin mother and a magical
resurrection are given the same credence as the Celts' mischievous
crop-goblins. As we become a more and more freethinking world,
eventually all religious holidays will be celebrated with this same
humanist spirit, as a gentle tribute to a people who simply didn't know
any better.
From everyone at Freethought Forum, have a safe and happy Halloween.
Copyright
2006
Aimee Romero.
