Halloween is scary — apparently. From every corner of digital Christendom is sounding the quaking alarm that participation in Halloween is tantamount to inviting the devil into your house. Hearsay about pagan origins and evil practices abounds. Even cooler-headed writers skeptical of the dubious beginnings of trick-or-treating and jack-o-lanterns warn that the overall character of Halloween is unprofitable at best and harmful at worst. But there’s a countering voice among Christians (and among people of other religions or none) that Halloween is totally innocent fun, that it’s inconsequential, vacant amusement. I personally think Halloween may be more complex and interesting than either of those positions make it out to be. It may even be a source of sanity in an increasingly insane world.
“Hallowe’en” means “Hallows’ eve” and is the Vigil of “All Hallows’ Day”, better known as “All Saints’ Day” on November 1, the Western date for this Feast which seems to have spread from Rome in the 9th century. Apart from observing the liturgical Vigil of All Saints’ Day (as there’s a liturgical vigil for every major feast day), there wasn’t really an observance in the Church of “Hallowe’en” as a distinct day. Among the ancient Celts, however, there was already a very ancient, and perhaps numinous, harvest festival on October 31 called Samhain (pr. ˈsɑːwɪn). With the felicitous proximity of the old remembrance of Samhain to the newly instituted Roman All Saints’ Day on November 1 and later All Souls’ Day on November 2, for the Christians in the old Celtic and British lands this seems to have created a natural cognitive (and spiritual) connection, sometimes collectively referred to as Hallowtide.
Halloween is a cultural phenomenon, not a liturgical one. But I don’t think it should be ignored or dismissed because of that. Part of what has made October 31 so enduring as a numinous, uncanny day is its having been culturally connected to the following two liturgical days. All Hallows’ Day (“Hallow” being an old English word for holy, or Saint) commemorates the triumphant in Christ, those Saints to whom we pray. All Souls’ Day commemorates the faithful departed, those for whom we pray. But Hallow’s Eve–what is that about?
The truth is that death is a very unsure thing, and as humans without perfect spiritual sight, we can’t see beyond the veil of its boundary very well at all. The celebrations of the Saints and the commendation of the souls of our loved ones are squarely in the realm of Faith: that which is not seen. And they both have their days (November 1 and 2 respectively). But for all the other questions and ponderings and wonderings and uneasiness we have about death, there is the first of the days in Hallowtide. A day not liturgical in character, but devotional. A day on which a certain old adage has never been more appropriate: memento mori. Remember death.
Across the world, pagan cultures have found ways of remembering death on certain days: days when spirits are said to walk the earth again for a night, and when traditions of both welcoming and warding off the the spirits would take place. Though there will obviously be differences in the ancient Celtic Samhain, the Chinese Quingming, and the pagan Roman Lemuria, the similarities are more striking. The fact that festivals for the dead were independently developed by sundry cultures around the world says something about our shared human condition. And the curious combination of honoring ancestors while warding off maleficent or bothersome ghosts at the same time is telling. This halting veneration demonstrates that the reality of human death is murky, obscure, and uncertain. But death is inevitable, and during these festivals it is often confronted by visiting graves, telling ghost stories, and dressing up as ghosts or skeletons. There’s often even an element of humor amidst the unease, as the whole gamut of human emotion finds a place in the looming shadow of our own mortality.
C.S. Lewis remarked about this combination of humor and unease regarding our human mortality in his book Miracles. The fact that humans feel uncomfortable with dead bodies and ghosts and the fact that we tell coarse jokes about our bodies both demonstrate the ‘maladjustment’ we’ve had with our post-fall mortality. You may hold that both ghost stories and coarse jokes about the body are bad, Lewis says. Or, “You may hold that both—though they result, like clothes, from the fall—are, like clothes, the proper way to deal with the fall once it has occurred. That when perfected and recreated, man will no longer experience that kind of laughter or that kind of shudder. Yet here and now, not to feel the horror and not to see the joke is to be less than human. But either way, the facts bear witness to our present maladjustment.”
Like clothes after the fall, it may be that festivals of the dead are part of the way humanity has had to deal with the fall and our struggle with mortality. But something else has dealt with the fall, of course: something far more profound and efficacious, namely the incarnation of God. The Word of God united himself to humanity by putting on a body and a soul, uniting the two in perfect harmony, and even defeating death, the enemy that had up to that point always split them. Orthodox Christian theology affirms that human beings can ontologically partake of the perfected Christ-life and “put to death the death in our members”, leaving behind corpses less prone to decay and souls less shadowy and more solid in preparation for the resurrection. Nevertheless, corpses and ghosts we will still become until the Day of radical recreation is realized.
My point in acknowledging the universal human impulse to observe “days of the dead” is that they remind us of and consciously connect us to our common infirmity known as mortality. The difference for Christians is that we have an answer to that problem; we do not “mourn as those who have no hope.” But not to mourn at all, not to feel the horror and not to see the joke, is to be less than human.
And make no mistake, we’re increasingly surrounded by those who don’t get it. Serious people are publishing in serious scientific journals serious research suggesting that in time, with the proper technique, humans will be able to stop aging, conquer all diseases, and live forever. In the ultimate Promethean smash-and-grab, man will swipe the immortal fruit off the Tree of Life from which he was barred so long ago and dance irreverently down the corridors of eternity. Ignoring the pitchfork-wielding mob of theists, philosophers, and other obscurantists, our scientists will happily ignore even the warning of their colleague Dr. Frankenstein, assured that their superior technique will produce no monsters. (Did you know that the full title of Mary Shelly’s book is ‘Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus’?).
At least on Halloween we know to call a monster a monster. Something of an increasingly invisible reality in the world is made a little more clear on this one spooky night of the year. Even for Orthodox Christians, who should be reminded constantly through the Church’s services and their own devotions that they are going to die and the veil to that world is always near, the secular, modern world has a way of numbing that remembrance in us. But as I took an evening stroll around my neighborhood tonight and enjoyed all the decorated yards, the world did seem more numinous, just a little more haunted. In a world of iPhones, CNN, free 2-day shipping, and celebrity gossip, slowing to a trick-or-treating pace and feeling a little uneasy before the eerie unknown may just help in restoring us to a level of sanity and wakefulness that we hadn’t realized we were missing. With a renewed awareness, under the weight of the inevitability of death, we may just experience the paradoxical levity of knowing there’s nothing we can do about it on our own. We may see the joke. But then, neither do we have to laugh as those who have no hope.
Memento mori.