HALLOWEEN

For Some, Halloween is Holiest Night of the Year

By Richard N. Ostling
Associated Press Religion Reporter

CBN.com – (AP) -- Is Halloween more than a goofy night for candy and costumes? Those fundamentalist Christians who bemoan it as a pagan holiday know what they're talking about.

The authority for that assertion? None other than proudly pagan Gerina Dunwich of Los Angeles, a self-professed practicing witch of 25 years' standing. She explains the spiritual significance of Oct. 31 in her new paperback, "The Pagan Book of Halloween" (Penguin).

Much to Dunwich's regret, Europe's "Old Religion" of pre-Christian times and worship of variegated nature deities (she lists 43 goddesses and 21 gods around the world) was supplanted over the centuries by devotion to the one God of the Bible -- or as Dunwich would have it "the Christians' patriarchal god."

Today, with networking assists from the Internet, the ancient creed is being reconstituted in new form by seekers, occultists and feminists. In his Encyclopedia of American Religions, J. Gordon Melton catalogs dozens of groups, some defunct and none sizable, that follow "Neo-Paganism," "magick," witchcraft or Wicca, and related practices.

Long ago, Dunwich writes, the church counteracted the pagans by Christianizing their old rituals. Since the pagans had their festival of the dead, the seventh-century papacy introduced All Saints' Day to honor early Christian martyrs. In 900, the original date of May 13 was switched to Nov. 1, matching the pagan Oct. 31.

For pagans, that was the holiest night of the year, the point when the connection to supernatural forces was strongest and the barrier between the living and the dead was weakest.

In the British Isles, the pagan Oct. 31 was Samhain, meaning "summer's end." For Christians, the night before All Saints' was All Hallows' Eve, hallow meaning "holy," which evolved into "Halloween."

By Dunwich's account, virtually everything we associate with Halloween is rooted in pagan ritual:

Nighttime in general, bats, cats, spiders, broomsticks, skeletons, ghosts, goblins, cauldrons, masquerades, trick-or-treating (recalling deeds of mischievous spirits), jack-o'-lanterns (to scare away earthbound ghosts), bobbing for apples (drawn from an old divination rite), and even the black-and-orange color scheme (black for death and magic, orange evoking nature's harvest time).

She says 19th-century Irish immigrants brought to America the pagan holdovers that constitute what we think of as Halloween. (At the same time, other immigrants were generating Santa Claus, decorated trees and other non-Christian add-ons to create the modern American Christmas).

The Irish drew upon lore of the pre-Christian Celtic peoples and their priestly caste, the Druids. Theirs was a lusty and sometimes sinister creed. Druids are thought to have burned to death prisoners of war and criminals on the holy night.

Sometimes horses, oxen and especially cats would be roasted alive as sacrifices, too. The purpose was not just to appease the deity of the dead but to foretell the future by the way victims died.

In one legend, every seven years an odd, dark-skinned race stole children and sacrificed them to their god. Another said townspeople were required to surrender two-thirds of their children to a feared race of gods every Nov. 1.

Is that the inspiration for those Halloween slasher films? Perhaps, but Dunwich emphasizes that her modern Neo-Pagans have not revived such ancient traditions.

As for lust, some Wiccans still perform "the Great Rite" at Halloween, sacred copulation between the high priestess and high priest of a coven. This rouses "magickal energy" and represents the sacred union of "the Goddess and Her consort, the Horned God," a masculine personification of "the Life Force" that dies each year on this night.

But Dunwich informs us that the act "is normally carried out in private" and many prefer instead to enact it symbolically.

She says today's Neo-Pagans believe in Eastern religions' teaching of reincarnation, an endless sequence of lives with one's fate determined by karma, the accumulation of negative deeds. For that reason, she reports, wise pagans no longer practice black magic.

Richard N. Ostling, AP religion writer, is co-author of "Mormon America," issued in paperback by HarperSanFrancisco.

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