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Comment by throw4847285 | Hacker News Reader

This is a very sloppy argument. The first citation is a work from the 60s which makes the unsubstantiated claim that some kind of practice was actually the survival of a prehistoric fertility cult. Then later the author says any claim made about a prehistoric society must be taken with a grain of salt... and then he makes a sweeping claim.

As far as I know, the modern historical consensus is that Samhain had no link to the dead and that aspect comes entirely from Christianity. People project a lot onto the past based on their assumptions about what seems pagan and what seems Christian, and what they project onto paganism is things that feel non-modern (belief in the supernatural, practices tied to the cycle of the year, things that seem "spooky.")

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I was going to say the same thing. There is nothing "deep" about this history, the article is a string of poorly connected events that still try to bring up the spectre of wrong ideas that came out in the 60's tying Samhaim to our modern Halloween which has been refuted many many times. I am sorry but bonfires are not really associated with modern Halloween and just because ancient persians used them does not meaningfully tie that in with trick or treating, ghouls and ghosts. Even this actual line sounds nothing like our modern halloween:

> A 12th-century Irish source records a week of feasting during this time, when “there would be nothing but meetings and games and amusements and entertainments and eating and feasting" (sounds fun!).2 There is talk of kindling sacred fires, and of spirits and ghosts wandering the earth. But very little detail.

This sounds more like Thanksgiving (or fall festivals Oktoberfest etc) than halloween.

I almost lost it when he started making claims about proto-Indo-European religion.

I don't want to dunk on the author too much. His book about Margaret Mead and psychedelics sounds interesting, and I read a couple positive reviews of it. It looks like he spent too much studying early anthropologists and he seems to be replicating their worst qualities as academics.

> As far as I know, the modern historical consensus is that Samhain had no link to the dead and that aspect comes entirely from Christianity.

As far as I know it’s build on a harvest festival which happened to be when the veil between our world and other worlds were thin. That didn’t necessarily mean spirits of dead people, but also faeries and stuff. Of course the Christian church mostly took the timing of the already existing festival and used it as their own because people didn’t really want to stop celebrating what they usually did (who would?) and Christianity worked with what it had.

There is no evidence, as far as I'm aware, that Samhaim was associated with the "veil between worlds being thin" prior to Christianization. The medieval Church was not allergic to rituals that involved the spirits of the dead. The belief that these practices are anti-Christian or pagan is a product of the Protestant Reformation.

The notion that the Church was acting in a deliberate way to co-opt certain festivals that it couldn't destroy gives it too much credit. Syncretism is often bottom up. And many of the practices that survive are tied to the human experience in ways that transcend any specific belief system, like the changing of the seasons and the agricultural cycle.

Also, treating paganism as some undifferentiated whole is ahistorical. Why do people talk about ancient Indo-European rituals that survive for millenia and then Christianity is the rupture? More likely, religious beliefs changed many times, and Samhain was itself a syncretic combination of a new belief system with pre-Samhain harvest festival practices.

> a product of the Protestant Reformation.

It's instructive to note the beginning date of the Reformation: 31 October 1517. Likewise, 5 November 1605 remains significant for Protestants.

Bonfires on the 5th of November have been obligatory for centuries, and therefore strongly associated with this season. For Protestants. Protestant bonfires. Not pagan. Burning their fellow Christians in effigy.

I would say that those two events, combined with Día de los Muertos influence, are the most enlightening aspects of Halloween culture.

In fact, rather than Christians co-opting paganism, it's more properly a case of anti-Catholic bigotry co-opting All Saints Day. The secular/pagan/demonic overtones are merely allied with the Protestant jihad.

> Bonfires on the 5th of November have been obligatory for centuries, and therefore strongly associated with this season. For Protestants. Protestant bonfires. Not pagan. Burning their fellow Christians in effigy.

English Protestants. England isn't the world, even the Protestant world.

> As far as I know it’s build on a harvest festival which happened to be when the veil between our world and other worlds were thin. That didn’t necessarily mean spirits of dead people, but also faeries and stuff.

A lot of these types of claims came from the book The Golden Bough, which gets things wrong:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Bough

A good weblog post that goes into primary sources and how Bough influenced popular culture is:

> Contrary to Seth Andrews’ claims about “the Catholic Church” stealing a pagan festival “involving the druid priests and the people dressing up in masks and tricks and treats”, the date and most of the traditions are firmly Christian in origin. The November 1 date that is the centre of “Allhallowmas” was not derived from any “Celtic” original and the original Irish date for an All Saints feast moved from April 20 to November 1 due to the influence of Continental and English liturgical practice. That this meant the new All Saints Day fell on the “quarter day” of Samhain was pure coincidence. Contrary to repeated insistence in popular sources, scholars can find no clear indication of any ritual or religious practices on Samhain, and certainly none that can be traced to later Halloween traditions. Masks, costumes, trick or treating, Halloween games etc. all either have known traditional Christian origins or simply cannot be linked to anything definitely pre-Christian.

* https://historyforatheists.com/2021/10/is-halloween-pagan/

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