Parents have lot of things to worry about Halloween, poisonous candy,
accidentally putting your child in a costume that in the future will be seen as racist,
and the dark lord of the flies, Mephistopheles, the father of lies, Satan himself.
But how the devil did the devil get mixed up in Halloween?
I think a lot of people seem to know now that Halloween is
based upon the ancient Celtic harvest holiday of Samhain when
the vail between the living and dead worlds is at its thinnest.
But what you may not know is that in early Christianity,
just like in the Jewish religion it evolved from, the devil didn’t really exist. They
believed there was no other power than God. Sure, the devil pops up here and there in
the scriptures, but he’s just not really a main character, he’s all part of God’s plan.
It’s not until the the 2nd century that we start to get the idea of the trickster fallen angel
Lucifer to explain why god seemingly allows some pretty awful things to happen. Meanwhile,
the spreading Christianity meets the Pagan Celts, and Pope after Pope in the Middle Ages struggles
with the fact these people are open to Jesus as savior, but man oh man, do they love fairies.
To help recruitment, Christianity decides to do some retconning of their narrative.
Because the belief in spooks like ghosts and goblins was so ingrained in this culture,
it made the argument that there was no other power in the world other than God
a lot harder to swallow - so the Popes simply decided to take all
the supernatural beings of the Celts and make them servants of the devil. Sorry leprechauns!
Like Christmas and the Winter Solstice or Yule, the church moves the celebrations of All Saints
Day to coincide with the Autumn equinox’s Samhain. Like, “hey Celts, we’re not saying
the dead DON’T walk the earth when the leaves change… also have you heard the good word?”
But when we get to the 1300’s things take a turn for the dark-er, as a group called the Cathars
rises in France. They try to understand why in the Old Testament with all his flooding and smiting,
God is kind of a jerk, but in the New Testament he’s all goodness and light, and can serve you
near infinite wine… So they start to preach that there are two equal but opposite deities and by
the way anyone who worships only the Evil Old Testament God are followers of Satan.
This causes the Catholic Church to start The Medieval Inquisition to try
and remove the Cathars from the picture, but hey can’t stop this idea of Dualism,
a good god and his arch-nemesis from creepnig into Catholicism.
And by the 1400’s, when Pope innocent writes “The Hammer of Witches,”- the book that not only
puts the Devil in the evil column, but paints anyone who follows Satan a witch.The Europeans
love this idea, especially as excuse to kill over 60,000 people - mostly women who just spoke their
mind…. Which as we all know is brought over into the New World, who have their own witch hunts.
Still, most of what we think of as Halloween survives through all of this in Ireland,
who remember, you just can’t stop believing in fairies… and is imported into America
in the 1800’s with Irish Immigrants…then evolves into what we know of as Halloween
in the 20th century. This makes Halloween just as authentically Irish in origin as St Patrick’s Day.
Judeo-Christian beliefs are ironically not set in stone,
and one of the reasons they have survived as long as they have is the humans in
charge were very good at co-opting other’s beliefs. Through association, Halloween,
the most blatantly Wiccan and pagan of all our Holidays, got a bad wrap. No one is saying Santa
Claus is a servant of The Dark Lord, but he’s just as Pagan in origin as a Jack O Lantern.