Pagan Halloween?

Pagan Halloween?

The idea that all the traditional holidays and festivals of the year are “pagan” in origin and were simply “stolen by the Church” is one that has permeated popular culture and is repeated without question in newspaper, magazine and online articles. Unfortunately, many anti-theistic polemicists cannot resist a chance to get in a jab at any aspect of Christianity being “really pagan”, so every October we see supposed rationalists parroting pseudo history about the “pagan origins of Halloween”, with no sign of any fact-checking, let alone engagement with scholarship. In fact, the claim that Halloween is “pagan” is largely a nineteenth century myth.

This video is based on my earlier article on this subject, for those who prefer a text version – Is Halloween Pagan?

For those who prefer the audio version, the Podcast edition is now up on Buzzsprout or available on most podcast platforms. Or you can listen to it on the History for Atheists podcast page.

24 thoughts on “Pagan Halloween?

  1. I was just reading what Wikipedia had for All Saints Day
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Saints%27_Day#cite_ref-CatSaint_26-0
    It asserts that the pagan feast of Lemuralia/Lemuria is associated to the early church selecting the date of 13 May in 609 CE or 610 CE.
    As far as i can tell(not extensive searching at all), the Feast of Lemures/Lemuralia did involve the dead, but this festival was no longer celebrated in tje Roman Empire as it died out in 3rd century. Why would a pope select a date because a no longer celebrated festival?

    Also, I noticed that almost all the sources for this assertion, reference this work:
    https://www.jstor.org/stable/i253711
    The Author is Violet Alford
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_Alford

    I am just wondering if you have ever stumbled upon her work

    Thankful for your work and the blog.

    Sincerely,

    Tom Jones(not so unusual)

  2. Another fantastic post by the great Tim O’Neill! I must ask something as a bit of a suggestion. Will you at least sometime in the future write full-fledged articles on Witches/Spanish Inquistion, Gay people historically, and the badhistory surrounding both topics? I do not have any specific badhistory recommendations but the two are a general phenomenon.

  3. At first, the scholars who defend the Church – or in this case, its history – seem very very rational and well informed. And indeed they know a lot.

    However? Many readers of a certain age, can remember going to hundreds of apparently very very well-, even brilliantly-reasoned sermons, “proving” there was a God, and so forth.

    So should we simply trust the very articulate and highly polished surface of religious scholarshship, to be all the proof we need, that their arguments are correct and true?

    Very often people who appear to be brilliantly rational, and well-informed in one sphere or another, will abandon reason, or misuse it in sophistical arguments. To “prove” a point they are deep down, basically, emotionally attached to.

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    1. The scholars in questions here are historians, not people who “defend the Church”. They are simply researching the subject, analysing the evidence and drawing the best conclusions. You seem to think they are some kind of apologists for Christianity. You’re very confused. They aren’t. Hutton, for example, is himself a neo-pagan.

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      1. The Church long used assurances and appearances of supernatural rectitude and certainty – holiness; etc.. – to sell or bolster their articulate but still at times questionable findings.

        When the churches were counter-questioned with equal or possibly superior articulations? When the churches’ arguments were apparently in logical or factual trouble? The churches simply resorted to raw Force. They sent police or mobs in effect, to silence, censor, abolish, disappear, burn, any writings by critics.

        Today of course, many blogs discussing various topics, in the interest in fair and open discussion, are far more likely to allow even critics of stated positions, to have their say.

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        1. What has any of that meandering crap got to do with what I said or with the scholars who I refer to on this question? If you want to go pick a fight with a Christian apologist, go find one. You’re in the wrong place for that here. Either say something that is relevant to the issues under discussion here or go ramble incoherently somewhere else.

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    2. Almost everything ToN writes is scholarly consensus. Among those scholars you can find catholics, protestants, unbelievers, jews and muslims. Whether the offered knowledge can be called objective is debatable, but it’s certainly intersubjective.

    3. I’m of a certain age and have attended hundreds of sermons but none defended it proved anything. They were preaching , after all, to the converted.

  4. I’ve got a PhD myself. And I’ve just spent about 10 years arguing with professors, scholarly advocates of “historical” Jesus. Like say Larry Hurtado, former dean of Edinburgh. They all sound very rational and well informed. But? By far most of them still go to church services. And ? Very few of them allow any serious data challenging them, to be discussed on their blogs; or published in their journals.

    Though I believe I have found a new journal that is only now beginning to do that.

    1. I have no idea what the historical Jesus has to do with the myth of the pagan origins of Halloween. But the claim that many of the scholars who accept a historical Jesus are Christians and so biased doesn’t work. Because the majority of NON-Christian scholars also accept a historical Jesus. So it’s not a matter of bias, it’s a matter of what reading of the evidence we have makes the most sense. The Jesus Mythicist alternatives are rejected by almost all scholars, Christian or non-Christian, because they are ideologically driven, convoluted and contrived.

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  5. Tim,
    I think one thing you might consider more is that feasts, festivals and holiday are identified in one way and another with formalised religion but become fairly easily part of what you’d call community- or popular culture and when things change at the top – like which is the official religion of the Roman empire, or whether Ireland is now to be deemed Christian – the things people like doing continue, and if the things at the top don’t e.g. set aside a day for it anymore, it’s recognised just as a folk tradition. I’m thinking of the end-of-winter /Easter day in Russia where the custom was that each household brought out for a communal feast all the food remaining after the long winter, and the housewife who had the most to show was much admired because it needed fine judgement to balance the needs of health with longer-term survival. In the same way, I do think there’s evidence that such feasts of the dead as the Romans’ (they had three feasts of the dead each year) were so old by the 3rdC AD that if the church forbade them, it might give rise to dissatisfaction with this new, oriental cult. So just give it a new rationale. We know this was done in other cases such as bringing in new ‘saints’ whose histories proved, later, to be very dubious indeed. St. Christopher is an obvious example. I agree with you, of course, that Halloween doesn’t appear to spring from Irish roots.

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  6. Sorry about the late reply. I suppose what I meant, back in February, was that the usual debate ignore happily ‘grey’ between positively pagan and positively Christian. There are no labels on besoms or easter-eggs saying ‘Christian’ or ‘pagan’ and while its fun as an historian to go into the origins of rituals around releasing souls of the dead around ‘all Hallows e’en’, people who maintain rituals aren’t necessarily doing it now – or ever were – from a sense of religious devotion. Like easter-egg hunting, what’s foremost in the people’s mind is about remembering what gave us joy as children and hoping to give children now the same sort of memories later. I suppose I mean that a society can do just the same things, while the heavens turn, bringing shamanism, then worship of Roman emperors, then Christianity, then maybe Islam.. but people still hang things from a special tree. I think Halloween was pagan, then Christian, and now it’s mainly American.

    1. I think Halloween was pagan, then Christian, and now it’s mainly American.

      No, just Christian, now American. Never pagan. Sorry.

  7. Tim,

    I can’t connect to this video from you site. When I click on it, I get a blank screen with the statement that Youtube refused to connect.

    Lindsay Harrison

    1. I’ve been overseas for a month and have just got home, so it may be a while before I have something ready to post. But it will probably be on the claim that the Catholic Church didn’t admit heliocentrism was true until 1992 and that Pope John Paul II “apologised” to Galileo then. This will be a chance to detail the much longer and more interesting story of post-Galileo religious reactions to heliocentrism and how the Church slowly and awkwardly rehabilitated Galileo over a period of several centuries after heliocentrism became the scientific consensus.

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