There is nothing ‘pagan’ (still less, ‘satanic’) about Halloween

So many ironies, I don’t even know where to start. But to save time, let’s begin by taking a closer look at these two photographs.

Now: to be fair to Fr David Muscat, I imagine he wasn’t the one who chose that particular picture, to accompany a press article about his latest rant against Halloween (and all the supposedly ‘satanic, pagan’ influences thereof).

For if his intention really was to ‘sound a warning for parents who plan to let their children dress up [as devils, ghouls, vampires, witches, bogeymen, etc.]’…. he would hardly have opted to dress himself up, for the occasion, as a ‘Ku Klux Klansman, getting ready for a spot of good old-fashioned ethnic cleansing’… would he now?

On one level, the visual impact simply annihilates the entire point he was trying to get across – in the sense that: how can you possibly take the man seriously, when he is, a) warning against the dangers of children wearing ‘spooky’ fancy-dress costumes; and b) caught in the act of putting on an even ‘spookier’ outfit, himself?

But on another: the unmistakable ‘KKK’ connotation – even if obviously misplaced – only serves to recall the many, many times when Fr David Muscat not only ‘looked’ like a Klansman… but sounded like one, too (among other things, by endorsing the openly racist, Holocaust-denying views of Norman Lowell’s Imperium Europa).

And yes, yes: I am perfectly aware that it is clearly a coincidence; and that the costume he was putting on, was most likely in preparation for the annual Good Friday procession…

But… erm… that only adds to the irony, don’t you think?

Leaving aside that Fr Muscat’s (presumably ‘angelic’) Good Friday costume is infinitely SCARIER, than the harmless, cartoony child-devil we see in the other picture… there is also the fact that nearly all the Catholic Church’s most cherished festivals (including both Christmas and Easter) can also trace their origins to the same pagan traditions that Fr Muscat now denounces as ‘Satanic’.

And this brings me to first problem with this widely-held misconception. [To be fair to Fr Muscat for a second time: he is hardly the first to have ever expressed it. In 2016, Edgar Preca – husband to then-President Marie-Louise Coleiro-Preca – had likewise warned that: “Few perhaps know that the feast of Halloween is a satanic holiday….”]

I’ll try and keep this as brief as I possibly can (but it’s going to be difficult, seeing as we’re trying to cram around 8,000 years of history into just a few sentences): but ‘paganism’ and ‘satanism’ are not exactly synonymous, you know….

Quite the contrary, in fact. Naturally, I won’t bother attempting a proper definition of ‘Paganism’ – the term is far too broad for that - but let’s just say, for now, that it represents an entire mindset (of which ‘religion’ played only a small part) that was designed to cope with a world in which human beings generally felt ‘powerless against the elements’ (or as Shakespeare would put it, many millennia later: ‘As flies to boys are we to the wanton gods; they kill us for their sport’).

For much the same reason, the countless pagan pantheons that once existed were all neatly divided into ‘gods’ and ‘goddesses’ that embodied the unconquerable powers of all those elements – from the physical:  the sky, the wind, the rain, the sea, etc.; to the metaphysical: love, life, death, war, etc.

And under those circumstances: it is hardly surprising that the ancients would also have - consciously, this time – create all those gods and goddesses ‘in their own image and likeness’; and with their own (greatly magnified) ‘lusts and impulses’.

After all, if you’re trying to placate an otherwise indifferent ‘god’ or ‘goddess’: to guarantee the success of your next harvest, perhaps; or to provide a favourable trade-wind, for your next invasion of Troy…

Let’s face it: even from our own contemporary experience, in 2022, we can all confirm that it’s a heck of a lot easier, when those in power can be ‘tempted’ (or ‘bribed’) in exactly the same way, as any other human…

And at the risk of a truly mythical oversimplification: there is simply no room for any form ‘Satan-type character’, in that paradigm.  So much so, that there are no ‘gods’ or ‘goddesses’ – anywhere in European mythologies, at any rate – that can directly be equated to Christianity’s ‘Prince of Darkness’.

This is partly because those pagan belief-systems (for rather self-evident reasons) didn’t define ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ in quite the same black-and-white terms, as the Judeo-Christian religions that would supplant them.

For unlike the Christians, Jews and Muslims of later millennia: those people were under no illusion whatsoever, that the world they inhabited was ‘created by a benevolent Deity’; and as such, that it must have been inherently ‘good’, from the moment of Creation…  until Nasty Old Nick suddenly came along, to screw everything up.

Simply put: there is no direct equivalent, anywhere in the pagan canon, of the Biblical verse that: ‘God looked upon his creation, and saw that it was Good’. As such, those pagans had no motivation to even account for the existence of ‘Evil’ in the world, at all…. still less, to come up with the idea that ‘God’s perfect creation must, perforce, have been CORRUPTED.’

Hence the most glaring irony of them all: if there is no connection whatsoever, between ‘paganism’ and ‘satanism’ (a concept which, by the way, only makes sense in a monotheistic religion, to begin with)… why are so many people so utterly convinced that those two words refer to one and the same thing?

Honestly: do I need to even answer that? Because Christianity forged the link itself, of course! In its bid to phase out all those archaic, pre-Christian beliefs… early Christians did pretty much exactly the same thing Fr David Muscat – and so many others –  are doing today: they literally ‘demonised’ all those mythical gods and monsters… to make them all fit neatly into the new, approved (and monotheistic) paradigm, that they were trying to impose.

Even so, however: little of this has much to do with Halloween, anyway; because paradoxically enough, Halloween is one of the very, very few Christian festivals that CAN’T be traced to pagan times; nor even remotely close, for that matter.

Not just because the festival itself (in its present form, at any rate) doesn’t even date back to the 19th century: still less, to any pagan tradition that would have completely died out, in Europe, way over a thousand years earlier… but also because there is no connection whatsoever, between the ‘Halloween’ tradition we so recently imported from America – and even then, mostly through cinema and television - and the ‘Celtic, druidic origins’ that have been erroneously attributed to it, ever since.

Here, I shall have to resort to a spot of well-intentioned plagiarism… and invite you to consider the research of Fr Augustine Thompson, O.P.: an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, who wrote a seminal essay on the origins of Halloween in 2000.

Not only is Fr Thompson (unlike myself) clearly an expert in the field; but he is also (like Fr Muscat) a Catholic priest; and – much more importantly, from a sceptic’s point of view – his conclusions happen to tally perfectly, with all other accepted research into the same question.

In any case: Thompson begins by pointing out that, “We’ve all heard the allegations: Halloween is a pagan rite dating back to some pre-Christian festival among the Celtic Druids that escaped church suppression. […] If you let your kids go trick-or-treating, they will be worshiping the devil and pagan gods.”

Sounds kind of familiar already, huh? But he also goes on to state: “Nothing could be further from the truth. The origins of Halloween are, in fact, very Christian and rather American…”

What follows is a detailed explanation of how most of what we now associate with this festival – including its ‘ghoulish’ character, and all the associated iconography: the Jack O’Lanterns, etc. – can all be traced to traditions imported to America, by mostly Irish and French immigrants, from the 1700s onwards; and more compellingly still, that these early variations bore no resemblance whatsoever, to anything we would recognise as ‘Halloween’ today.

The name itself is (or should be) a dead giveaway: Halloween is an abbreviation of ‘All Hallows Even’…  which translates roughly into: “the night before the (very Christian) feast we celebrate here in Malta as ‘All Saints’.”

But the most conspicuous detail is the date: which was moved from the original March 13, to the current November 1, on the (entirely arbitrary) whim of Pope Gregory, back in the eighth century; and as Thompson notes, “In those days Halloween didn’t have any special significance for Christians or for long-dead Celtic pagans…”

As for everything else that was added later: some of it (for instance, ‘Trick or Treat’) has origins that can be traced back to the Middle Ages, at the very earliest; while others – like the addition of ‘witches’, to Halloween’s ghoulish parade – came about because: “The greeting card industry added them in the late 1800s”; presumably, to further commercialise a festival, that was fast becoming as popular – and lucrative – as Christmas…

And well, that’s the extent of it, really. There is nothing you can remotely describe as ‘pagan’, ‘satanic’, or ‘evil’, about Halloween. Such a pity, that I can’t quite say the same for a few of the other views expressed by Fr David Muscat – and others like him – over the years...