The Truth About Halloween: Debunking Myths of Pagan Origins

welcome back to Sheamus poy I'm Joe hesme this time of year people often ask if we should really be celebrating

Halloween after all isn't Halloween just a christianized version of an ancient pagan holiday called sa wasn't that some

ancient Celtic Pagan Ritual Day which they contacted the dead and had bonfires to ward off evil spirits and the dead

walked among the living if you've heard any of that I'm excited to tell you that's all mythological that's not true

that's not true history that's based on bad outdated scholarship that had very little evidentiary value in the first

place which we now have strong reasons to believe is flatly untrue so to get there I want to look at several

different sources and I want to start with Robert Davis from the University of Glasgow up in Scotland in his escaping

through Flames Halloween is a Christian Festival because in there he points out that it's actually kind of controversial

to say what should be really straightforward namely that Halloween is Christian Feast it is the eve of All

holies or all hallowed so All Saints the word for Saint is like the word for Holy is hallow so if you remember in the Our

Father Hallowed be thy name so the evening before that like Christmas Eve All Hallows Eve becomes Halloween that's

it it's not a pagan day nevertheless to say that these days is to court hostility from two rival factions on the

one hand neopagans people who imagin themselves as the The Heirs to the ancient Druids

and this Celtic religion that they think existed before Christianity and they're they're trying to restore it and they've

tried to take Halloween as their rightful kind of lineage so for instance here's a video from a pagan on YouTube

Just from two days ago making this argument hello my name is Jacob todson and welcome back to the wisdom of Odin

it's finally Autumn I finally get to wear my scarf again and this also means we're closer to one of the best holidays

and Pagan celebrations that still exist today now most people might know this holiday as Halloween however the origins

of Halloween are within sin which is spelled Sam Haan so that's the first scrip you kind of get it you know if

they want to claim the holiday they don't want to find out that they really didn't there is no such thing as old

Celtic paganism and they didn't have a big religious holiday on sa that's probably not going to be good news to

the pagans but weirder are there's a bunch of Evangelical Christians mostly in the US who are convinced that it's

sinful to celebrate Halloween because they also think Halloween is of pagan not Christian origin they also buy into

this story about sa and so they think it's satanic and idolatrous and dishonoring to God so here's a kind of

classic example from the Christian Perspective so Halloween was a celebration to honor or remember the

dead it was called all Hallow's Eve but many people can trace it back all the way to the pagans specifically a Celtic

Pagan celebration called sin now this was basically a magical Harvest Festival that prepared people for the winter that

was to come it was not Christian at all um it was used to worship specifically other gods but as Davis points out this

idea that Halloween is just a thinly papered over Christian version of a pagan holiday it's firmly ingrained in

the popular imination partly because of older ethnographic scholarship so 19th century to Mid 20th century you had

Scholars who would seriously make the claims you're still hearing people make today and as a result it's become very

difficult to question those assumptions after all as he points out they're repeated annually in serious journalism

in the broadcast media they're pervasively on the internet and even in well-intended educational literature and

rarely do people actually stop and say well how do we know that to be true what's the actual proof of this

connection between sin and Halloween and that's what I want to do today because it turns out that evidence is not there

at all dup in in Davis's words he says deeper scrutiny of the tissue of

conjecture supposition and survivalism on which the account of the Pagan Halloween rests raises the most serious

doubts about the accustomed identification of Halloween with pre-christian Celtic religious practice

and he Nots that even imagining there is such a thing as Celtic paganism is probably not an intelligible idea but

this whole popular Story the one that if you think you know better than your neighbor about Halloween you've probably

bought into is itself a myth it is false and to show that I want to take one of the popular presentations from National

Geographic and just show how in a very short span of time it advances five Theses that we can say pretty

definitively are not true so here's the video and then we'll unpack it one by one it all began with the Kelts a people

whose culture had spread across Europe more than 2,000 years ago October 31st was the day they celebrated the end of

the harvest season in a festival called SE that night also marked the Celtic New Year and was considered a time between

years a magical time when the ghost of the Dead walked the Earth it was the time when the veil between

death and life was supposed to be at its thinness on sin the villagers gathered and lit huge bonfires to drive the dead

back to the spirit world and keep them away from the living but as the Catholic Church's

influence grew in Europe it frowned on the Pagan rituals like s in the 7th century the Vatican began

to merge it with a church sanctioned holiday so November 1st was designated All Saints Day to honor Martyrs and the

deceased faithful both of these holidays had to do with the afterlife and about survival

after death it it was a calculated move on the part of the church to bring more people into the

fold All Saints Day was known then as halus hallow means holy or saintly so the

translation is roughly mass of the Saints the night before October 31st was all Hallow's Eve which gradually morphed

into Halloween all right so the Halloween is Pagan idea rests on really five claims or five assumptions number

one there's a people called the Kelts and they have a common culture and common religion and common lurgical

calendar where they're all celebrating this feast day on the same day number two Salin their feast day is also the

Celtic New Year that's going to be important because as a result of that we get to number three that is this magical

time between the years in which the ghosts of the Dead can walk among the living on

Earth number four uh this is why bonfires are created to ward off the dead and drive them back and number five

when Christianity comes along the Catholic Church invents all Saints Day in depending on the version of the story

either as a Christian alternative to sin a response to SA or just a Christian version of sa we wanted to keep this

Pagan feast day but we wanted just we just change the name it's like doing somebody else's homework and you just

scratch out their name and put your name on it well here's the thing all five of those claims are false number one there

is no one group called The Kelts Celtic is this broad linguistic category that is sometimes used to describe a bunch of

different tribes and cultures and peoples and languages that did not have the same

religion number two uh sin is not a Celtic anything it's an Irish day and it's not as far as we can tell new

years's we know uh when the Kelts uh celebrated New Years and it wasn't on November 1st number three sin was not

viewed as far as we can tell as a magical time of year or between the years in which the dead are walking

among the living we don't have any of that in the historical evidence this is just modern fantasies about the past

number four uh while there are bonfires that are sometimes used on all hallow Eve it turns out these are of Christian

and not pagan origin and number five All Saints Day being on November 1st has literally nothing to do with sin and we

can see that from the evidence so let's look at each of those in turn number one was there one big Celtic Pagan religion

so I don't know if you caught this I'm going to play you just a couple Clips or a couple seconds from the clip we just

heard and just listen to the way they speak about the Kelts as if they're a real group that's a monolithic kind of

hole it all began with the Kelts a people whose culture had spread across Europe more than 2,000 years ago October

31st was the day they celebrated the end of the harvest season in a festival called SE so the reason people like

Robert Davis say it's not even clear it's intelligible to speak of pre-christian Celtic religious practice

is because the Kelts are people originally from Central Europe and then they spread out in all directions so

they go as far east as was now turkey so when St Paul writes to the Galatians those are a Celtic people they have

started speaking and writing in Greek they have become Roman pagans and then started practicing Christianity but that

should have immediately raised some red flags like oh it doesn't sound like they're doing sa

over there in turkey and they spread all across Southern Poland and in parts of Eastern Europe they go across what are

called the low countries Southern Germany France Spain especially the Northwest tip of Spain galacia and then

the British Isles as well now within a fairly short span of time other tribes and groups kind of

push them out and so later on when we talk about the Kelts we typically mean Northwest Spain Northwest France Ireland

and then Scotland England Wales still these are large Slots of area speaking several different

languages having pretty different cultures and so it's a myth and a mistake to treat them as one monolithic

group that has a culture that's a people that is spread across Europe that's just not how tribes worked or work Malcolm

Chapman makes this point really effectively in his book The Kelts the construction of a myth that kelt is not

even what these different tribes called themselves rather caltoy comes from the Greek historian Herodotus using it to

refer to a group of Barbarians north and west of the Greeks it's just kind of a catchall for The Barbarians over there

it's not an accurate term to describe any one group of people and I Chapman begins his book

actually quoting Jr tolken who in addition to writing the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit uh knew a ton about

language if you know anything about tolking you know that to be true and he points out how maddening it is because

there is a language family called Celtic but it doesn't refer to just like one group of people any more than you would

talk about the romance peoples and you know lump together modern Italians and Spaniards and these are not the same

people French and Portuguese uh it's just there's enough differences you wouldn't lump all those together

presumably into one as like Latins or romance peoples but that's what's happening here in tolk's words to many

perhaps to most people outside the small company of the great Scholars past and present Celtic of any sort is a magic

bag into which anything may be put and out of which almost anything may come anything is possible in the fabulous

Celtic Twilight which is not so much a Twilight of the Gods as of the reason in other words people are talking nonsense

and just imagining pulling out of this magic bag of History Celtic fill in the blank so if you want to imagine ancient

pagans doing your preferred thing just call it Celtic it's a vague enough term that no one can really say you're wrong

there's going to be a few more reasons for that as well as I mentioned uh this is a term not used by any groups of

themselves it's a term the Greeks use as a catchall for non-greek people in a certain part

of Europe similarly they use p I is kind of a catchall for the non-greek people to the east of them but as Chapman

points out we would never use the fact that the Greeks call them all Persians as evidence that they had the same

ethnicity language and culture all across the Middle East they clearly did not and do not and yet we treat the

entire Northwest of Europe as if it's populated by a single people that we can call the

Kels so the word barbarian by the way I've used that a few times here that is the Greek term for non-greeks coming

from the way they sound when they talk Bar Bar Bar Bar Bar and you wouldn't be so foolish as to Imagine The Barbarians

are like one group of people oh the Barbarian King said the new Barbarian feast day is on X day no of course not

but when you're using kelt you're using a term that's about that level of inaccurate another reason that matters

is because among the different Celtic peoples like the GS and France we know a couple things about their religion and a

couple things that limit our knowledge of their religion so of all people I want to turn down to Julius Caesar who

knew the GS pretty well from having fought them and he wrote an entire book on the goic wars and he points out that

The Druids even though they would use Greek characters to transliterate their language uh or languages in public and

private transactions when it came to religion they wouldn't write anything down now he hypothesizes that they seem

to do that for two reasons number one because they don't want to divulge their teachings to the larger populace and

number two because they're afraid that if they get accustomed to writing then they won't have as much stuff committed

to memory so everything was transmitted at the level of The Druids like the religious

teachers orally nothing was written down and it was actually taught not to write things down

apparently do you see why that makes it very difficult to say and they definitely had this religion and this is

definitely what it looked like and here are the doctrines and here are the feast days in addition to the fact that you're

lumping other people from Spain France England Scotland Wales and Ireland all into one group many of the people within

that group are not literate and many of the ones that are literate as a matter of principle won't write their religious

teachings down so now jump forward a couple thousand years and try to guess what their religion was and you can see

why Scholars have been stemed so when someone tells you confidently here's what happened at sa and here's all of

the old ancient Celtic rituals they're making that up because we have the evidence the little bits we do have

actually Point against the claims about sa so Caesar goes on to say one of the leading tenants of the French Celts that

he knew the Galls were that the souls do not become extinct but pass after death from one body to another now in other

words they believed in reincarnation now if you believe in reincarnation you're probably not celebrating sin in the

mythological version of it National Geographic and others have put out of like a Day of commemorating the Dead

well according to this view the dead aren't even dead they've just gone to live in some other body so they're

probably not walking around among the dead on one night of the year no they're walking around among the Dead all the

time because they're a different person now my point there is there isn't like this whole idea of Celtic paganism is a

misnomer and is a myth there's great work done on this by the way ironically by a historian who is also a pagan

Ronald Hutton in his book the Stations of the Sun a history of the rural year in Britain and he points out that modern

Scholars no longer believe in this idea of a Celtic religion because it doesn't make any sense he points out in the old

days they would look at this Irish God who was known as Lou l u g and then they would notice there all these Roman

cities that we find everywhere from England to Southern France to the Netherlands to northern France to Poland

with inscriptions in France and Spain as well that have L as part of the name or lug as part of the name and they thought

ah these must be cities named in honor of this local God but as Hutton points out the problem with that theory is in

Roman Gul we actually find hundreds of religious dedications to different gods and not one of them refers to this Irish

God Lou and so we now think that Lou probably is not a term for this God but rather the word meant something else and

so maybe the god being worshiped in Ireland is n the same one pagans in France or Spain or Poland or wherever

are worshiping which of course makes sense but as Hutton points out this point matters because this same

generation of Scholars who fell for this idea they're pan Celtic deities that all these different tribes worship the same

gods and even by the same names also tended to fall for the idea of pan Celtic festivals that all of

these different kults celebrated an important religious feast day called sa it turns out that his built on this not

just Rocky Foundation but a foundation we know to be false it just papers over all the differences between these

different groups and treats them as one group with one culture now I'm leaving aside one group of Kelts which are the

Irish because it needs to be treated a little separately as Davis points out we do find Irish evidence of Sal the

problem is we only find Irish evidence of Sal just like we only found Irish evidence of the god l so the fact that

all of the evidence for sin comes from Irish material show is reinforced by the fact we find no instances whatsoever of

anything Halloween looking before Christianity in early Welsh or Scottish material except in areas of heavy Irish

migration so to the extent you have anything like sin it seems to be only in Ireland or places where the Irish are

migrating and showing up but then you say okay fine it's not a Celtic feast day it's an Irish feast day

isn't that the same thing well no for two reasons number one because the whole idea of the Catholic Church changed its

lurgical calendar to respond to this Celtic feast day presupposes this thing is like a big thing across Europe the

idea that the entire Church's calendar was going to be changed to respond to one Island no offense

Ireland is obviously less plausible but number two and actually more importantly even though we find plenty of references

to sin none of them give any indication of anything like a religious or supernal significance so I want you to think

about that you'll hear these very detailed accounts about everything that happened at sin and all these religious

feasts and festivals and rights and all this and none of it is is true none of that is coming now look let's be clear

the fact we don't have any evidence of it doesn't mean people weren't doing something but it does mean we don't know

what they were doing if anything we have plenty of evidence of what they were doing none of it mentions

religion but the popular story is that this is a religious holy day by all evidence it's not this is a Harvest

Festival so this is an agrarian society where you're working hard in the field and then it's harvest time and you're

Gathering everything up and then on this day everybody gets together because the work is over and it's time to have a

feast and celebrate it's like a retirement party but for the year I mean in the same way

that like you might have a party when your kids school gets out but that doesn't make it like a religious

Festival it's just like hey we've got free time it's Friday evening let's go to the bar that kind of mentality that's

what's going on with th by all the available evidence I want to repeat Davis's claim that we have have

recognition but it is almost exclusively to agrarian routines and there is no indication of actions exhibiting a

religious or Supernatural significance so we've seen so far number one there is no pan Celtic religious Festival across

Europe called sa does not exist it's a scholarly myth number two there is a local Irish Harvest Festival but it

doesn't appear to have any clear religious overtones at all so the idea that Halloween is a big response by the

Christians because they're worried that what the Irish people are relaxing after the Harvest is n sensical right so

everything else we're going to hear about how the dead walked among the living on sa those are just myths that

non-celtic non-pagan people have invented and projected onto the past so that get to the second claim was sa the

Celtic New Year because if you remember from the National Geographic clip it just casually claimed that it was that

night also marked the Celtic New Year and was considered a time between years so you can see why it matters that it's

allegedly New Years because it's this time between years when the dead can walk among the

living and you can find if you go to the History Channel's website and look up what is the history of Halloween they

claim the same thing there's this group called The Kelts which know that isn't true the Kelts who lived 2,000 years ago

mostly in the area that's now the Ireland the United Kingdom in northern France celebrated their new year on

November 1st they just claim this as if this is a clear fact of history and it's not it's simply untrue as Davis points

out the only pre-christian Celtic calendar we have makes no mention of sin it's from France not from Ireland and it

clearly has the new year at the win winter solstice not November 1st so you might say well where did this myth that

the new year started on November 1st start from well it started from Sir John rise in the 19th century he's a

philologist meaning he studied languages and he suggested that it had been the Celtic new here this is his

invention but he was clear he didn't get that from any ancient records he wasn't able to point to any ancient documents

that said that instead he was looking at 19th century Welsh and Irish folklore and then taking from those stories

projecting onto the past that therefore November 1st must have originally been the new year now we can't prove that's

wrong I suppose but there's no evidence for it in fact there a good deal of evidence against it the problem is as

Ronald Hutton points out writing Christianity and the Roman Calendar all enter Wales and Ireland as part of the

same process so by the time you have literacy it's because Christians coming from a Roman background have arrived and

so the earliest calendars we see here in places like Wales and Ireland remember excluding the one pre-christian one that

doesn't mention sin and and shows the winner Solstice by the time you have widespread literacy it's because there's

widespread christianization and unsurprisingly we find New Years on January 1 or on March

25th which is when it falls on the Roman Calendar so all the evidence we have points against November 1st but we can't

say anything more definitively because we don't have anything besides that like if you just said I think there's a tribe

in the Pacific that doesn't have any written records and it's undiscovered and their New Year's is May 17th I can't

prove you wrong because I haven't found that tribe and neither have you but you probably shouldn't claim that as a fact

because you're making it up so November 1st is not the Celtic New Year there probably wasn't a single Celtic new year

but if there was it was probably the winter solstice so so much for claim number two

what about claim number three did the dead walk the earth on S now you remember this is because it was

allegedly between the years here's how National Geographic puts it a magical time when the ghost of the Dead walked

the Earth it was the time when the veil between death and life was supposed to be at its thinnest and sure enough

History Channel likewise claims that Kelts believed the night before the new year which again they're just imagining

November 1st is the new year that and then there's also one group called The Kelts and they believe that the night

before the new year the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred and that's why they

celebrated sin which we've already seen all the evidence doesn't say anything about that it only talks about it being

a Harvest Festival because it's not the beginning of the new year but it is the end of the Agricultural

season as Robert Davis points out that the Festival of Sal on November 1st figured prominently in the

Agricultural and legal calendars of early medieval Ireland is beyond dispute so in the Middle Ages Salin is still an

important time of year because as an Agricultural Society the modern equivalent would be the end

of the fiscal year if you're familiar with this like if you work in certain businesses you've got the end of a

certain cycle and it might be May 1st might be a different beginning of a different month well likewise if you've

got a school year the Academic Year stops so you can be out for the summer these are seasonal and so it makes sense

that in an Agricultural Society when the agricultural year is over you celebrate the end of the year and that's an

important both legal and agricultural day so important things happened politically then you would have you know

like uh if the people needed to come together to vote on something or legal stuff that kind of stuff happened on sin

it's less exciting when you find out the actual stuff going on there there was plenty of festivity as well but as Davis

points out with the exception of druidic forgeries such as the notorious 17th century fraer Jeffrey keing no

pre-christian or medieval historical source clearly associate Sal with any of the three pillars of the Pagan

hypothesis now what are the Pagan hypothesis claims number one that this was a day of the veneration of the Dead

we don't see any evidence of that number two that this is a day of Supernatural activity because of the temporal

proximity to the other world this is that very thin line between the living and the dead on New Year's Eve October

31st and number three we don't see any celebration of it as a Celtic New Year's Eve in the first place so none of those

things are true as far as we can tell they're just popularly repeated myths and I wanted to contrast here a kind of

Infamous scene from a movie Halloween 2 and it's Infamous because they get both the name and the meaning of sa wrong and

then contrast that with an actual Pagan talking about what sin actually was so first here's Halloween too Sam

Hayne it means the lord of the Dead the of Summer the Festival of Sam Hayne no one

to contrast that with Jacob todson who as I say it was a pagan trying to reclaim sa but even he realizes it's not

Sam Hayne and it's not the lord of the Dead the word doesn't mean that at all as he points out its name literally just

means The Summer's end which alludes us to the date of s which is October 31st going into November 1st so that should

automatically give you a clue okay if this just means Summer's end it's not the name of some Pagan deity it's not

the lord of the dead it's just Summer's end like you might find on a school calendar it has those kind of

connotations and it turns out it doesn't just have those connotations in the name but also in everything we know about it

so I'm going to go back to Jacob todson again now when it comes to the actual traditions of ancient Salon festivals

this is where it gets a little harder there are a few stories that do mention sa still but typically it's as a date

not necessarily as like a description of the festival so he's going to claim you know there's some stories that exist to

talk about the thinning of the veil but if you saw in the clip he puts five stories on the screen that take place at

Salon none of which mention any particular religious rights they just use it as a a convenient kind of

Storytelling device oh they met each other at this festival at Sal that sort of thing it's the end of summer people

come together in the same way that you might have a movie set at Christmas time and it doesn't mean you actually think

this is a thinning of the veil when elves come out from the North Pole no it's convenient for storytelling

purposes whatever religious or non-religious reasons it may have my point there is that the stuff we have

about Sal doesn't make it seem like a major religious feast day it simply doesn't so what about this stuff with

the dead because there clearly is with Halloween this connection with the dead well as Hutton points out that's not

actually in s at all that's all from Christianity that the dead as he puts it

arrived later in 998 odelo Abbot of Clooney ordered a Solemn Mass for The Souls of all Christian dead in his

Monastery and his daughter houses now originally this is in February but he sets this precedent of having a day set

aside for praying for the souls in purgatory praying for the dead and eventually it gets linked up to All

Saints Day but not the day before it's The Day After All Souls day and and so that sets this time of year not just as

a time where we joyously celebrate the Saints in heaven but are also reminded of the reality of suffering and

purgatory and death and so that is not something they're getting from Irish paganism but something they're getting

from Roman Catholicism indeed as Hutton points out by the high Middle Ages both festivals

he means here All Saints Day and All Souls days had become primarily a time at which to pray for dead friends or

family members and it seems appropriate right you got the withering of flowers and

leaves the coming of frost and it's natural one's mind turns to death because all around you things appear to

be dying now he acknowledges it remains possible that northern European pagans

honored their debt at this time but not only is the evidence still utterly wanting but Fraser who was one of the

major figures in creating this myth his chain of reasoning completely breaks down so we can't prove again that it

didn't happen but we have no evidence that it did so that's the third claim that the dead are walking among the

living and that's why people are praying for the dead nope they're praying for the dead because of Christianity the

fourth claim did s bonfires Drive the dead away well obviously if the dead weren't walking among the living because

it wasn't really new years's and everything else then it makes sense that the bonfire stuff also probably not

going to be real and sure enough it made sense that there were bonfire because you've got the end of

the Harvest and so this makes sense uh time of warfare and trading is at end so there's a season and when you go back to

the ancient world there's a time of year where you can go out to fight you don't want to be fighting in the middle of

winter because you're both going to die and so everything comes soon in the trade season the Warfare season the

agricultural season and therefore it makes sense that you have things like the fesh of s s which local Kings gather

the people and it's a favorite setting for early Irish tales as we already talked about that and so he points out

um how in these Tales we find nothing but meetings and games and Amusements and entertainments and eating and

feasting that's from the actual ancient like medieval evidence and we don't see anything suggesting some ancient

religious rituals and so he says Hutton says these activities together with with a great

deal of boasting and brawling are precisely those portrayed at the fishh in this and other accounts of it and he

says no doubt there were religious observances as well but none of the tales ever portrays any so we can't

again prove that there weren't some religious elements at times I mean anytime people come together they may

want to honor God or honor their gods but this wasn't a religious feast I mean if you come together for dinner you

might say grace before meal but I don't think you'd normally call dinner like a religious time of year

here indeed and remember we mentioned Jeffrey keing Hutton likewise says other than him uh he's going to be one of the

ones who mentions this idea of a sacred fire even kin who is considered a forger and

thoroughly unreliable he doesn't give us any sources for this idea of these old sin bonfires and sacred fires and he

implies a kind of pan-celtic degree of religious in political centralization in Pagan Ireland and that doesn't seem to

be true at best I mean he's either making it up or Hutton suggests this might be a mistaken transference of the

custa belan at the beginning of the summer there was a religious holiday that some ancient Irish pagans

celebrated and so some of the claims about sa seem to be just claims about belain applied to the wrong

day and or just applied by analogy well the beginning of Summer was a time when people thought the dead could walk then

maybe they thought they could walk among us at the end of the summer sure maybe but you don't have any evidence of

that so Hutton goes on to say uh we put King's Story aside the rights of sa do not feature in sorry he said we have

this considerable suspicion that the reason the rights of s do not feature in medieval Irish literature is because by

the time it was written centuries after Christianity has arrived the authors don't know what they had been in other

words by the time you have like these 12th century documents they're not talking about the religious rights of

sin because they have no idea what people did on sin now why does that matter well because that's a pretty

clear sign that Halloween isn't a response to this feast day that people don't even know what it was or what

people did I mean you can see on the calendar there was a day called salon and you can see that this was a

political administrative cultural time of year that was important and there are plenty of stories set at it but no one

has any idea what religious implications it had or rights it had whatsoever so that's going to mean number one you

can't plausibly say they're the the things we do at Halloween because you're just making that up and number two it

makes it really clear that Halloween isn't a Christian response to sin because we don't know what was even like

the Christians didn't even know what was going on at sin by the time Christianity had really taken over

Ireland okay so how do we make sense of the bonfire fires then if it's not this like Pagan thing i' point out that

before electricity fires are pretty important for just having lights at night but there's also a long-standing

not Irish Celtic Pagan practice of lighting a candle and praying for the dead and this happened in churches in

the days before All Saints and All Souls day but during the Reformation uh this becomes outlawed that you're not allowed

to pray for the dead and so the people who continue to hold on to Catholic Christianity I go outside and so as

Hutton points out we actually do have evidence of people in the countryside in Britain uh going outside in the middle

of the night on the night before All Saints Day which is to say on Halloween uh even into the early 19th century and

they were doing this to go out to have a place to pray for the dead when they weren't allowed to do it in the churches

because Catholicism was outlawed and so they then light a bunch of burning St on the end of a fork and they kneel around

in a circle and pray for the souls of relatives and friends until the Flames burned out in other words they very much

did what you would do in church with a candle but with a bonfire outside instead and they used it as an

opportunity so you would have on the hillsides on the night of Halloween these bonfires that would pop

up all over the place and it was in the middle of the N it was harder to you know track down and and get the people

who were doing it but it was people quietly practicing their religion and praying for the debt but all of that is

coming again not from paganism but from Christianity all right so that leads us to the biggest claim that All Saints Day

is itself a response to salent now you're going to find a bunch of different claims I'm going to start with

National Geographic because I've been looking at them kind of throughout but then I'm going to give you another

example from Evangelical Protestants making the same fictional claim but here's Neo first the Catholic Church's

influence grew in Europe it frowned on the Pagan rituals like sa in the 7th Century the Vatican began

to merge it with a church sanctioned holiday so November 1st was designated All Saints Day to honor Martyrs and the

deceased faithful both of these holidays had to do with the

afterlife and about survival after death it was a calculated move on the part of the church to bring more people into the

old and here's a popular Evangelical Christian making the same kind of claim now remember in the 800s after Christ a

lot of the pagans became Christians but their Customs still survived and they merged it with Christian holidays now

listen carefully the Catholic Church celebrated All Saints Day on the 1st of November and All Souls day on the 2nd

but there was a problem these days were too close to sa so they didn't like it because of course sa was a festival for

pagans right celebrated other Gods Not Jesus Christ not God so a lot of people believed what they did is they chose to

merge it and call it Halloween so those are kind of the two major versions of the story and one version Halloween is

created as a response to sin and the other it's just like there's this awkward like oh you've got a major day

about the Dead the night before we've got two feast days one celebrating the dead in Heaven and one praying for the

dead in purgatory what a weird coincidence none of that is accurate but you'll notice those not even the same

version of the story uh likewise I want to give you a little bit from Lisa Morton's trick-or treat a history of

Halloween because these are books written on the subject that repeat these same

falsehoods and as we're going to see easily just proven falsehoods she comes maybe the closest to at least trying to

get it right she says Sal's existence is unest questionable now that's true but what she doesn't tell you is as a not

clearly religious Harvest Festival but fine okay and sometime in the mid 8th Century Pope Gregory III moved the Feast

of the martyrs to November 1st the date of salon and indicated that it was henceforth to be a celebration of all

the saints 100 years later Pope Gregory IV ordered Universal observance of the day then kind of gets to history right

not quite we're going to see but then she asks well was it date moved to November 1st so the Harvest could be

used to feed the hordes of pilgrims flocking to Rome for the Saints celebration as some historians have

suggested or was it relocated in the calendar in an attempt to co-opt sin which the christianized Kelts were slow

to give up well we already saw the christianized Kelts first of all it's a misnomer these are a bunch of different

groups of people and number two when they're christianized they are so thoroughly christianized they don't even

know what their ancestors did on sin uh and number three as we're going to see that's neither of the possibilities that

Lisa Morton gives are why it ends up on November 1st it was not a decision originally from Rome it wasn't about

Roman pilgrims and it wasn't about salent remember once you stop believing in pan Celtic religion Sal is a Harvest

Festival on one Island the idea that the entire calendar has to be changed in a universal observance created to co-opt

or reut that doesn't make sense on its face but now I'm going to give you the actual history and you'll see why this

is so laughably wrong Christians are celebrating All Saints or what we would

later become known as All Saints by the mid 300s originally is a feast to honor all those who've been martyred and it's

mentioned uh in the 300s and it originally happened on May 13th

by the 400s different places are celebrating at different times so for instance Syrian churches hold this

commemoration during Easter week Greek churches uh do the Sunday after Pentecost Rome keeps the older practice

of May 13th and Pope bonifus I 4 actually endorses that one in 609 it doesn't move then until a little bit

after that I believe in the 8th Century might be the 9th century but it is Pope Gregory theii but notably

Gregory the third doesn't invent that rather the church's lurgical calendar up in Germany they had started celebrating

on November 1st it makes sense we don't know exactly why they did that the best guess is well it's fall people are

thinking about death more so it seems like a fitting time and so it doesn't start in Ireland it starts in Germany

and it isn't done by the Roman Catholic Church originally the church in Rome responds to a local custom in Ireland

excuse me in Germany and then makes the German practice Universal uh so meanwhile in Ireland

it's not on October 31st it was instead on April 20th in the Early Middle Ages so that's a lot of information the

point that you need to know there is the local Irish Church wasn't trying to use All Saints as a response to sin it

there's no reason to believe they needed to respond to sin it wasn't a clear Pagan Festival in the first place and it

doesn't seem to have held much sway on the popular imagination after Christianity

arrived so instead they're celebrated on April the 20th nowhere near s uh the November 1st date doesn't come

from Rome doesn't come from Ireland it comes from Germany and so as Hutton points out both Celtic Europe and Rome

are following a Germanic idea so unless you want to say the Germans started celebrating All Saints Day on November

1st because they're worried about a local holiday in Ireland that had been celebrated hundreds of years earlier you

see how that doesn't make any sense at all like Rome isn't doing this because they're worried about tourists in Rome

they're doing this to have a common date where everybody around Christendom everyone around the church can celebrate

All Saints Day on the same day and so they choose the day that was being done in Germany that's it there's no big

mystery and it's a nice time of year to celebrate uh and to remember the dead okay so what can we take from all this

what's kind of the big picture of pagan Halloween I like the way Hutton puts it it must be concluded that the medieval

records furnish no evidence that November 1st was a major pan-celtic festival and there's no evidence of

religious ceremonies even where sin was observed there it is in a nutshell this wasn't a panel CC thing and it wasn't a

clearly religious thing maybe there were religious festivals we don't know but it wasn't something that seemed to be

bigger than Ireland in the first place so it's an end of summer gathering with no clear religious overtones uh it

has nothing to do with the creation or the timing of Halloween Halloween instead comes from the celebration of

All Saints Day and it's the evening before that All Saints Day itself comes from the early Church's desire to honor

the Saints and particularly the early Christian Martyrs All Souls day as we heard gets added in the Middle Ages as a

way to remind us to pray for the dead and to remember the fact that we will one day die okay so let's get practical

for a minute as we kind of wrap this up how should Christians approach Halloween then well obviously the popular answer

oh don't do it because it's Pagan or you know reclaim his Pagan roots or any of that is just built on pure fiction so

where does that leave us I would say on the one you don't want to become overly obsessed with the dark demonic

maab uh in Philippians chapter 4 St Paul says finally Brethren whatever is true whatever is Honorable whatever is just

whatever is pure whatever is lovely whatever is gracious if there is any Excellence if there is anything worthy

of Praise think about these things that's very good nevertheless we don't want to be blind to the reality of the

Demonic or evil or death and so we're reminded for for instance in 1 Peter 5 to be sober and watchful because your

adversary the devil prows around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour and we should also be mindful of

our own death now I realize this next verse isn't in Protestant Bibles but there's a great verse in s Act chter 7

verse 36 and all you do remember the end of your life and then you will never sin the point there being you should be

mindful of the fact that you will one day die and that will help you to live accordingly so it's actually healthy to

be periodically reminded of the spooky reality that you're going to be a skeleton one day you're going to die and

your body will rot in the grave and hopefully it is United to Christ such that it will rise again gloriously from

the dead Thomas Kus in imitation of Christ the I believe bestselling book in the Middle Ages had a beautiful

reflection on it he said if you've ever seen a man die remember that you too must go the same way in the morning

consider you may not live till evening and when evening comes do not dare to promise yourself the dawn be always

ready therefore and so live that death will never take you unprepared you should have that like be joyful by all

means don't be just gloomy about death but don't be oblivious to it either after all many Die suddenly and

unexpectedly for in the unexpected hour the Son of God will come when that last moment arrives

you'll begin to have a quite different opinion of the life that is now entirely passed and you'll regret very much that

you were so careless and remiss right so you should live in such a way that you are prepared for your death

which means it is good to be reminded of that and so medieval art has this really fascinating bent of things like the

dance macabra where it's the dance of death and so you can find things everything from just like skeletons and

decomposing bodies dancing around to A procession where it has Kings and popes and Priests and Ordinary People and you

name it being marched into the Grave by smiling skeletons and the point there is to remind you that high or low you will

die and you will stand before God and that's a good thing to be reminded of there's a reason Jesus gives us Parables

reminding us of the last judgment so I think embraced in the right way Halloween can be spiritually enriching

precisely by reminding Us in not too heavy of a way that evil exists that death exists

and that we should live accordingly if I can close on a personal note at my own wedding uh my wife

designed the uh idea for uh the bridal cake our friend Kate is an amazing cake decorator and so it has the Sacred Heart

of Jesus it has the Immaculate Heart of Mary and it has the crest of John Paul II but I had free reign to design the

Grooms cake and so I just put momento Mory with a skull on it momento Mory just means remember your death and so it

is appropriate to have festivity this is good good and healthy and there's nothing like Christian should not be

afraid that a party is going to somehow displease God unless you're doing something wicked you know getting drunk

or having premarital sex or whatever like if you're not doing something sinful then the mere fact that you're

together at a party is good Jesus went to parties the wedding Feast of kaaa is at a party Jesus is not afraid of I mean

this is one of the arguments against him right that oh the son of man comes and they call them Glutton and drunkards

because Jesus and his disciples are going to parties and eating and drinking and people were afraid they were having

too much fun don't be like that have fun Embrace Halloween in the good sense as long as you don't Embrace evil for

Evil's sake being reminded of evil even while you're having fun is actually a really healthy Christian attitude so I

would say don't be afraid to be a little bit spooky as long as you're not glamorizing evil don't be afraid to have

like you know we've got a a black cat inflatable that the kids like in front of our house it's not glamorizing evil

it's not celebrating wickedness or the occult and it certainly is not a representation of some imaginary Irish

Harvest Festival called sa so please Christians I'm begging you stop repeating these weird falsehoods

about paganism and stop being afraid of things that you have every right to enjoy as a Christian for Sheamus popri

I'm Joe hesm God bless you