What is Allhallowtide? The Real Origin of Halloween
Halloween as a Catholic term and annual event is actually part of what some today have colloquially dubbed the autumn "triduum", three back-to-back holy days comprising Allhallowtide (All holies season) in the Western Latin Church. The word "Halloween" dates back to 18th century Scottish, which is a shortening of the older phrase "All Hallows Even" or "the evening of the holies, i.e. - saints''. As Christmas Eve is the prayerful vigil preparing for Christmas (Christ's Mass), Halloween is the vigil looking ahead to the dawn of Hallowmas (Saint's Mass) on November 1st, which honors all the saints in glory, the healthiest organs in the one Body of Christ who offer intercessory prayer for the salvation of souls here on earth.
This high feast day of All Saints (equivalent to the sabbatical and celebratory character of a Sunday) is then followed by the somber All Souls Day on November 2nd, a memorial to commemorate and pray for the souls of all the departed, especially those who have died within the past year. With the Roman rite liturgical year winding down to a close and the coming of a new church year at Advent, the entire month of November is devoted to intercession for the souls in Purgatory, those whose final healing and sanctification in Christ are brought to completion in preparation for their full union in glory with God and his saints. In Latino culture, All Souls is celebrated as the "Day of the Dead '', when altars (ofrendas) are prepared with food, sugared skulls, flowers, and pictures to mourn and celebrate the beloved deceased and offer prayer for their souls.
An Oferanda for the Deceased
These three days of Allhallowtide honoring the saints, martyrs, and all the faithful departed trace back to the early Church when they were celebrated at various other times of the year with different frequency (as some Eastern Catholic churches still do), and since at least the early medieval period, the October-November Hallowtide has served as an occasion to remind all of us about the importance of preparing for a holy death and Eternal Life, the end goal of Christ's saving work celebrated earlier at Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. In a sense, this tiny "season" is a picture of three levels in the communion of saints, all those who are connected to the Father in and through Christ and the Holy Spirit. Halloween is the Church Militant's festive "Mardi-gras-like" jest at death and hell which have been conquered by Christ. Hallowmas (All Saints) celebrates the permanent victory of the Church Triumphant (those in heaven), and All Souls remembers the Church Suffering, all who are destined for glory but are undergoing temporary remediation to conform fully to Christ's holiness.
Allhallowtide has not been without its share of unfair criticism and mischaracterization throughout the centuries though, and this has led to a kind of cultural amnesia in modern times regarding the season's (specifically Halloween) origin.
Hallowtide Vanished From Protestant Calendars
Believe it or not, the idea that Halloween (liturgically All Hallows' Eve), even some of its modern spooky pop customs, originated in sadistic rituals of ancient Celtic paganism (Druidism) is an anti-Catholic, anti-Irish conspiratorial narrative dating back only to recent times, especially since the Protestant revolt of the 16th century and radical fudamentalist uprisings of the 19th century. When the disgruntled German priest Martin Luther mailed (not nailed as the propaganda would have us believe) his 95 Theses on October 31st, 1517, his specific target was the customs of Hallowtide (prayers and indulgences for souls in Purgatory; the authority of the Church to grant relief from temporal punishment; devotion to the relics of saints, etc.). There were indeed mischaracterizations and abuses of these fully Christian, Magisterially sanctioned, practices and beliefs at the local parish and community levels, but Luther's solution for reform was to throw the baby out with the bath water, arguing that purgatory, indulgences, etc. were unbiblical and therefore not binding on Christians, even if the legitimate successors of the apostles, Catholic bishops, affirmed they were indeed traditional and valid.
Once Luther got hold of the printing press, he and his followers launched an onslaught of polemical and calumnious literature accusing Catholics of idolatry and superstition, conflating pagan devotion with Christian customs in the Church's commemoration of the faithful departed. The more polemical Protestants eventually came to misconstrue petitioning saints for intercessory prayer as necromancy, and mistakenly viewed the honor of holy relics of saints as adoration of the ancestral dead. Hallowtide was eventually dropped, or rather vanished like ghost, from most Protestant calendars who felt it was pagan infiltration and replaced it with "Reformation Day '', a celebration of Luther's protest and unfortunate break with the Catholic Church.
Halloween's Folk Customs Over Time
Even before the 16th century, many early European Hallowtide folk customs, apart from the liturgical celebrations of the Church, focused on the themes of death, judgment, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. The Latin phrase Memento Mori or "remember you have to die" served as a sober reminder in Christian antiquity that earthly life is temporary, and that one should always live in harmony with grace to prepare for eternity with God. This focus doesn't negate the goodness and joys of earthly life which God created, for God's ultimate purpose is to restore back to humanity the divine image and likeness without the blemishes of sin and death, not only in spirit but in body through our sharing in the resurrection of Christ. However, a balanced focus on death does remind us not only to appreciate our lives now but understand that death doesn't have the final word, and that the fight against evil is a lifelong struggle. Still, our hope is in Christ who has already conquered sin and death and united all in his mystical Body, the Church. Death still temporarily severs the immediate physical connection between members, but all those who remain in Christ are never truly amputated from one another; each organ in the body still benefits the other in the circle of prayer.
The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” - 1 Corinthians 12:21
By the late Middle Ages the Memento Mori spirituality developed in some countries, especially after distressing times of pandemic, into the "Danse Macabre" or "dance of death". Villagers and nobles would take part in festive pageants and court masquerades, dressing up as corpses and skeletons from various classes (kings, nobles, peasants, clergy, etc) to remind everyone that all were equal in the eyes of death; all share the same destiny of the grave. This is probably the true origin of "guising" at Halloween, dressing up to remind one of death and even poke fun at it knowing that Christ has promised us that death is a temporary door to beatitude. Soul-caking, a custom of traveling from house to house asking for small spiced cakes in exchange for prayers for the deceased souls of the household, became a tradition at Hallowtide as well, and is probably the source of the American trick-or-treating tradition.
These lay festivities served as a "Mardi-gras-esque" prep for the solemn feast of All Saints. Just as Mardi-gras was brought to America by Europeans as a final feast before the beginning of Lenten fasting on Ash Wednesday, Halloween was the party before the holy day of prayer on Hallowmas. In fact, Halloween in its present festive form is really a modern American adaptation of the European Catholic focus on death and the afterlife, arising only since the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A quick snapshot at the increased usage frequency of the word "Halloween" in the past century shows this evolution of the holiday into secular culture. Halloween soon became associated with Gothic literature (Shelley, Poe, Irving), Universal monster movies, and autumn harvest festivals. Early in 20th century America, the annual custom of trick-or-treating was abused in some places as an occasion for vandalism and costly pranks gone too far, which led some communities to legally crack down on the custom. But these were usually exceptional cases, not the norm.
Curiously though, just as Halloween was becoming a thing in America thanks to the Irish (who were not custodians of pagan rituals) and the American accomodation of the traditional crafts and games, fundamentalists, who often rejected Christmas and Easter feasts as well, turned their negative attention towards these curious Hallowtide customs.
The "Devil's Holiday" Is Born...According to Propaganda
Even as tensions thankfully cooled over the centuries between mainstream, charitable Protestant Christians and Catholics seeking peaceful dialogue and friendship, anti-Catholic fundamentalists continued to cook up new conspiracy theories to link Catholic practice with pagan customs. This culminated in Alexander Hislop's 1858 book The Two Babylons which continued to make complex, false allegations that Catholic piety and worship traced its roots back not to Christ and the apostles but to various dark practices of the ancient pagan world. In Hislop's shoddy hypothesis, Catholics were syncretists: people who merged and polluted pure Christian creed and practice with other non-Christian religious systems in such a way as to distort or alter the gospel's original content, negating Catholicism as an authentic form of Christianity.
In the late 20th century, on the heels of the satanic panic of the 1970s and 80s, anti-Catholic Jack Chick cherry picked Hislop's more absurd allegations and recycled them in comic-book style tracts which made their way into trick-or-treaters' bags on Halloween night. Many of these tracts targeted Halloween as a "devil's holiday" with sinister origins in alleged human sacrifices of Druidic occultism and their festival of Samhain, a supposed time when ancients feared that spirits and evil entities could cross over the veil to haunt the living. The leftovers of this Celtic pagan occultism (Jack o' Lanterns, masquerading, soul-caking or trick or treating) were apparently kept alive by Irish Catholic immigrants in America, who were never fully purged of their darker Druid history. They were stigmatized as custodians of a tainted gospel which good Puritans in America had to keep guard against lest they be exposed to the horrors of invading papists and their pagan infiltration...or so the anti-Catholic propaganda machine and yellow journalism of the early modern era would have had us believe.
It's the same kind of silly, ahistorical fiction that has been spread for centuries by puritanical sects about the origin of other Catholic holy days such as Christmas (falsely connecting it to the Roman Saturnalia and Mirthras cults) and Easter (a supposed reinvention of ancient near Eastern devotion to Ishtar). In the minds of anti-Catholic (or rather anti-orthodox) fundamentalists, putting up a Christmas tree or decorating an Easter egg is just as sinfully pagan as carving a Jack 'o Lantern (none of which are pagan, but that doesn't stop experts on social media today from launching such attacks). Such earthy customs are pagan because Catholics, in their minds, aren't really Christians.
New Agers Crash the Party
Ironically, New Agers and Neo-Pagans came to claim that Halloween, as they understand it, is indeed a pagan festival older than the Christian Hallowtide, but this is also revisionist history, not facts. New forms of pagan devotion and esoteric systems only trace back to the 19th century, and do not truly resemble ancient systems and practices of pagan religions. New pagans simply co-opted the anti-Catholic myth spread by fundamentalists to bolster their claims of possessing a continuity to older and apparently superior forms of ancient cults which have had an impact on the world through infiltration into Chrisitianity. Another thing to keep in mind is that many myths exist about ancient pagan practices as well. Although many ancient non-Christian religions in the world indeed practiced ceremonies considered demonic even back then (the slaughter of innocent martyrs as sacrifices to false gods did occur at points in history in Roman, near-Eastern, Aztec cultures, etc.), the Celtic festival of Samhein was not the gruesome holiday revisionists claimed it to be; rather it was really a harvest festival on the cusp of winter and nothing more.
Specifically, the Druidic religion on the Emerald Isle fizzled out around the time of Jesus with varieties of other pagans remaining. The Christianization of these vestigial pagan tribes by St. Patrick and other missionaries from the 5th century onward was indeed thoroughly successful (thus the "snakes" were driven out), so much so that Ireland became a beacon of missionary work for the continent of Europe, with monks traveling large distances to establish monasteries, which served as ancient schools, libraries, scriptoriums, and hospitals. It was these monks who also privatized the sacrament of Confession, allowing penitents to come anonymously to reconciliation and carry out their penances in secret rather than in public as had been done before in antiquity.
The Church never absorbed and syncretized any evil pagan ceremonies with Catholic liturgy anywhere, but this does not mean the absorption and rededication of innocuous non-Christian customs is always bad. Christ came to baptize the world, not annihilate it, and that is what the Church does through healthy inculturation -- testing all things and retaining what is good. It is a genetic fallacy to assume that anything with a pagan origin carries over the error once associated with it. For example, the names of the days of the week and months are still pagan -- the Nordic and Roman names for various false gods and goddesses (e.g.- Thor's Day = Thursday; Sol's Day = Sunday). Even certain personal names have such origins. St. Martin of Tours and heretic Martin Luther both have first names which mean "dedicated to Mars" -- the god of war. None of this means that such days or people are under the dominion of pagan rule, for intention, knowledge, and action are what influence the state of societies and souls, not syllables in words. Yet, there are still groups who would contend otherwise, such as fundamentalists who accuse Catholics of moving the Sabbath to Sunday to worship the Sun, not the Son. The same goes with Halloween. Even if some innocuous customs were proven to trace back to ancient times where true religion had not taken root yet, how does such origin pollute its different usage in a human culture today? Many pagans invented and wore wedding rings. Does that fact pollute the usage of rings in Christian matrimony? Is the portrayal of Christ as a Phoenix arising to new life from its ashes a confusing conflation of the true God with pagan beasts? Of course not.
Bottom Line
Halloween in secular culture today certainly has little to do on the surface with Heaven, Hell, and Puragtory - although the universal human experience of death is very much tied to its observance, in a light hearted way. It's a common human desire to generate fictional tales of suspense, mystery, and horror, focusing on themes of life, death, alienation, loss, and danger (whether natural or supernatural) regardless of the time of year. The fact that autumn, even before Allhallowtide became more universal in the Church, reminded people in various cultlures of reality of death (winter is on the way) inspiring them to tell tales or create images of ghosts and mythic monsters is no surprise. This isn't to say that Halloween today is without abuses. Parents who are concerned with the safety of children in public, the effect of scary images and movies on impressionable youth, or dangerous occult elements lurking in the background thanks to neo-pagan imitation should exercise discretion and make choices to protect their families as needed. But rest assured, celebrating Halloween in a reasonable spooky manner with some make believe and games thrown in actually does more justice to the Catholic roots of the holiday which has been slandered over time by those who would prefer all things Hallowtide to default to Reformation Day, the unforunate Halloween in 1517 when reactionaries truncated the Deposit of Faith and forced Christians to undergo unfortunate splits and divisions affecting the family of God even today (Note: non-Catholic Christians are our separated brothers and sisters and not culpable for the formal schisms hundreds of years ago. Even Trent anathmatized any Catholics who denied the validty of Baptism administered properly to those already outside the immediate bonds of the visible Church. See CCC 817-819).
"For people are instructed in the truths of faith, and brought to appreciate the inner joys of religion far more effectually by the annual celebration of our sacred mysteries than by any official pronouncement of the teaching of the Church. Such pronouncements usually reach only a few and the more learned among the faithful; feasts reach them all; the former speak but once, the latter speak every year - in fact, forever. The church's teaching affects the mind primarily; her feasts affect both mind and heart, and have a salutary effect upon the whole of man's nature. Man is composed of body and soul, and he needs these external festivities so that the sacred rites, in all their beauty and variety, may stimulate him to drink more deeply of the fountain of God's teaching, that he may make it a part of himself, and use it with profit for his spiritual life." #21 QUAS PRIMAS So stay safe and have a holy and happy Allhallowtide! (and reasonably spooky and fun Halloween). "I believe in the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. Amen." - the Nicene Creed (325 A.D.)
Note: We can no longer recommend all of Taylor Marshall's writings (who is cited in the video) because he has falsely accused the Vatican of pagan infiltration in his recent publications on current events.
