Earth-Centered Spirituality Group

Sunday Sermon Archives

For Everything A Season

A sermon delivered to the Concord Unitarian Universalist Church, October 27, 2002, by Lorraine Ellis, Earth-Centered Spirituality Group

When we were approached by the Music & Worship Committee about presenting this worship service, it was suggested that we explore the history of Halloween, it’s pagan roots, and their relationship to the modern celebration of the holiday. Ok, let's have at it!

(Holding up Samhain sign.)

First, a little lesson in Gaelic. Gaelic has an amazingly complex set of rules for pronunciation. For one thing, the letter "h" is not really a letter. It’s more of an operator. Its function in a word is to change the sound of the letter in front of it. It acts differently depending upon what precedes it. In the case of an "m" the "h" turns the "m" into a "w." Therefore, this word is pronounced "Sa′-wen."

What does it mean? The most common definition for the word is "summer’s end." The ancient Celts conceived of only two seasons, summer and winter. Samhain represents the end of the summer and the beginning of winter.

But "wait!" you say, isn’t the Winter Solstice the first day of winter? To most western sensibilities, the seasons begin with the Solstices and Equinoxes. But let’s think about it for a moment. If you recognize Summer as the lightest quarter of the year – having the longest days, and Winter as the darkest quarter of the year – having the shortest days, then the Winter solstice is actually "mid-winter," and the Summer Solstice is actually "mid-summer." The equinoxes balance on the midpoints of the other two seasons, Spring and Autumn.

(Holding up diagram of the seasons).

Many modern pagans celebrate 8 seasonal holidays, evenly spaced out during the year. They are the solstices and the equinoxes, as well as the four cross-quarter days that fall exactly halfway between them. As you can see, here is the Winter Solstice, right in the middle of the winter season. Samhain is right here, tucked between the Winter Solstice and the Fall Equinox, right at the beginning of Winter.

I have found that any discussion of the history of Samhain and Halloween really needs to be introduced with a discussion of the history of neo-paganism That discussion is hampered by the fact that we now have two different histories of neo-paganism and modern witchcraft. And these two histories are fighting for dominance. The newest version of history seems to be winning.

Volumes have been written about the history of paganism and neo-paganism. This will be the Reader’s Digest version, as it might have been edited by the cruelest, most miserly editor I ever had in college.

Although the roots began to form as early as the 1400s, the history of modern paganism began in earnest in the mid 1800s. In the midst of the Romantic Era, Franz-Joseph Mone and later Jules Michelet, postulated that the millions of individuals who had been executed as witches during the middle ages were actually practicing an ancient, pre-Christian fertility religion, connected with the Graeco-Roman gods Dionysos and Hecate. In 1862, Michelet declared that Witchcraft, originating in the lower social levels, was actually an admirable movement, an early manifestation of the democratic spirit. According to Michelet it arose among the peasants of the Middle Ages as a protest against the oppression of the Church and the Feudal aristocracy.

Michelet went on to influence James Frazer in his book The Golden Bough, which elaborated further on the suspected survival of fertility cults through the middle ages.

In 1899, Charles Leland published a volume called Aradia, which claimed to be based on an old manuscript titled Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches. The manuscript was allegedly provided by an Italian Witch named Maddalena. In Aradia, Leland wrote of The Old Religion, the vecchia religione whose chief deity is Diana. According to the beliefs of this religion, Diana is the mother creator, who divides herself into the light and the dark. The dark she retains in herself, and the light she makes into Lucifer, her son and brother. Lucifer is a diabolical figure who is the most evil of all spirits reigning in hell. Diana and Lucifer produce a daughter, Aradia. Aradia is a goddess who acts as special patroness of Diana’s worshippers, who are called strege, or "witches." Aradia is the first witch, la prima strega.

Leland’s work was later corroborated by the highly influential anthropologist, Margaret Murray, in her book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. Printed in 1921, her book was also influenced by James Frazer’s ideas about fertility cults.

It was Margaret Murray who first made these theories of surviving goddess-worship and fertility cults a worldwide phenomenon. In fact, Murray’s theories resided, leather-bound, in the Encyclopedia Britannica for decades, as the subject’s most authoritative source. Under her brush, the Witches of the middle ages were vividly painted as the priests and priestesses of a beneficent goddess-centered agrarian religion.

Then came Gerald Gardner, a British civil servant who, from the mid 1940s to mid 50’s published works describing his initiation into a coven of British Witches, their practices, and their belief structure. These witches, he reported, were the modern descendents of a long line of Goddess-worshippers who had survived through the "Burning Times" and into the present. The religion was called Wicca. Gardner went on to found his own covens, which gave birth to other covens of varying traditions. In the course of the next 30 years, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people discovered and embraced Wicca in its various forms. It may have been the most astounding religious revolution since the Protestant Reformation. Women, in particular, were strongly attracted to Wicca’s feminist and empowering theology. Wicca may have had a greater influence than any of us know on the political landscape of the 60’s – a time when women began to reclaim their essential power and worth.

In the late 70’s Wicca began to "go public," through the efforts of writers like Starhawk, author of The Spiral Dance, and journalist Margot Adler, who wrote Drawing Down the Moon, the resurgence of paganism in America. An explosion of publications and the advent of the Internet in the 80’s resulted in a new movement, sort of a "protestant reformation" of the neo-pagan world. Thousands of individuals began to practice Wicca and other neo-pagan religions as "solitaries," rather than in formal covens. Indeed, recent internet-based polls indicate that those practicing solitary now outnumber coveners by a wide margin.

While Wicca is perhaps the most vocal and well known of the modern pagan religions, it is important to point out that many other traditions of paganism have developed during the last 80 years. Two of the more well known are Druidism, which draws from the beliefs of the ancient Celts, and Asatru, a revival of the ancient Norse religion. In addition, a large proportion of today’s pagans do not claim any particular formal tradition, but are practicing a general, eclectic, form of paganism.

While specific practices among pagans may differ on the surface, they all share a few basic beliefs: The Divine has both male and female aspects, and the Divine is present here with us, in the earth and in nature, rather than living separately from us in a distant heaven. Nature is a direct manifestation of the divine. Most pagans celebrate holidays that honor the changing seasons. Some also ritually mark the phases of the moon.

About 20 years ago, a new group of scholars began to arise. Slowly, through meticulous research, they began to pick away at 100 years of theory, confronting concepts that had previously been given the status of absolute fact.

Systematically, the icons have fallen. First, Charles Leland. It turns out that Leland admitted he never actually saw the manuscript that he claimed his Italian Witch found for him. In fact, he was never able to produce the Witch herself.

Then, Margaret Murray. Candace Savage, in her book, Witch: the wild ride from wicked to Wicca, writes, "Murray laid her case before the public in 1921 in a dry-as-dust anthropological treatise called The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. Surely nothing this meticulous and boring could possibly be mistaken. In page after detailed page she quoted snippets from hundreds of trials to build up a composite picture of the witches’ fertility rites. Virtually every statement she made was supported, chapter and verse, with examples drawn verbatim from the original trial records. Yet what readers could not know at the time was that Murray had cooked the books, by committing scholarly crimes of both commission and omission. When she’d happened upon a tidbit she liked, she had made the most of it, disguising her lack of evidence with a tone of calm assurance. (For example, she made the sweeping assertion that witches met in covens of thirteen on the basis of a single piece of trial testimony.) Conversely, details that didn’t suit her views were ignored without comment.

The most distressing development, however, has been the systematic debunking of Gerald Gardner. It is now reasonably clear that Gardner invented Wicca, based upon his readings of Leland, Frazier and Murray, among others. We now understand he pulled together the various elements of the religion from disparate sources – ceremonial magic and ritual from The Order of the Golden Dawn, reincarnation from eastern religions, Goddess-centered worship from Murray, and the form of the various holidays from a colleague’s study of Celtic and Anglo Saxon holiday traditions. Other details simply came from his own imagination.

Yes, there are countless pagan symbols and traditions that have been subsumed by Christianity. And the practice of folk magic and sorcery has survived through the millennia. Many witches claim a family or hereditary tradition for their form of spell-craft, divination, and healing practice. However, the survival of symbols is not the same as the survival of a religion, and the practice of magic is not the same as the practice of religion. Tragically, there does not seem to be a shred of evidence that any pre-Christian European pagan religions have survived in actual practice, since the Church accomplished its conversion of the masses prior to the Middle Ages.

Perhaps the final insult to the neo-pagan mythology is the re-writing of the history of the "Burning Times." Not only were none of those accused of witchcraft actually pagans, the number of dead has been revised steadily downward. The common belief had been that that those executed numbered in the millions. Today’s scholarship suggests the final count was probably closer to 100,000.

So. Where does this leave us modern pagans? It certainly takes us down a peg or two when we realize we can’t claim an ancient unbroken religious heritage. It’s awfully disappointing to learn that we are not worshipping in the same way as our ancient ancestors. We no longer have the credential of superior age. We’ve lost our martyrs. Worse still, is the idea that our religion, or its forebear, was simply "made up" by some guy with a fascination for old religions, ceremonial magic, and cavorting naked in the woods.

When I first discovered paganism, I was, in part, seduced by the "coolness" of following an ancient religion– one that was far older, and therefore more basic and genuine than Christianity. Closer to the divine source, perhaps. I’m afraid I was a bit of a snob about it, even if I never gave public voice to my snobbery. After a few months and some more research and reading, I came to understand the truth. I was more than a little disappointed, and a little bit embarrassed because I had been, at least for a short period of time, a pagan fundamentalist. Imagine me – a fundie!

As understanding grew, I faced what I’m sure many others in my position have faced – What am I to do now? What am I left with? How is the modern pagan to respond when the illusions are stripped away?

I think that being a newly converted UU helped save me from complete disillusionment. What does any UU do when their religious illusions lose their shine, or get completely trampled? We look carefully and objectively at what is left. We decide what is good and precious about our beliefs, and we mold a personal faith around that core set of truths. We understand that our truth does not have to match everyone else’s truth in order to be legitimate.

Jeffrey Russell, author of A History of Witchcraft: sorcerers, heretics and pagans, writes: "That Gardner invented the religion does not invalidate it. Every religion has a founder, and much that surrounds the origin of every religion is historically suspect. Lack of historicity does not necessarily deprive a religion of its insight. But no religion based on evidence that is demonstrably false is likely to survive long. That is why sophisticated witches have increasingly abandoned the argument that the Craft is an ancient religion based on a surviving tradition and argue instead for its validity in terms of its poetic, spiritual and psychological creativity."

Starhawk, a leading pagan writer, proclaims, "Although Goddess worship is unimaginably old, contemporary witchcraft could just as accurately be called the New Religion. The Craft, today, is undergoing more than a revival, it is experiencing a renaissance. Women are spurring this renewal and actively reawakening the Goddess, the image of the legitimacy and beneficence of female power." She goes on to say, "The importance of the Goddess symbol for women [in particular] cannot be overstressed. The image of the Goddess inspires women to see ourselves as divine, our bodies as sacred, the changing phases of our bodies as holy." There is nothing evil about women, she reminds us, nor has there ever been. We are exactly as we were meant to be.

Beyond the obvious, the celebration of both the feminine and masculine aspects of the divine, modern paganism is a beautifully symbolic religion that truly allows for everything in its season. The symbolism of the religion is intimately tied to the changing of seasons and what is going on in nature and in the earth at any given time of the year.

This leads us, finally to a discussion of Samhain and Halloween. Like the history of modern paganism, the history of these two holidays has changed with recent research.. The most common version had always gone something like this:

Samhain was one of four major Sabbats, or great feasts, celebrated by witches and pre-Christian pagans throughout the British Isles and northern Europe. On this night it was believed that the veil between the worlds of the living and dead was at its thinnest, so that the spirits of the dead could cross through into this world. Anyone who needed to be abroad at night would dress in disguises so the dead could not recognize them. They would carve turnips into lanterns with gruesome faces to scare evil spirits away. Families would also leave food on their doorsteps as gifts for their departed loved ones, or to pacify less friendly spirits. Trick or treating grew from the pranks of children and the foraging of the hungry poor who would vandalize the homes of those who did not leave offerings for the dead.

The early Church, like a religious precursor of the Borg, assimilated all of the pagan holidays and their customs, and in the case of Samhain, overwrote it with two new holidays – all Saints day on November 2, and All Souls Day, or All Hallows day on November 1. Samhain became All Hallows Eve, or Halloween.

Like the history of paganism, the history of Samhain is undergoing a metamorphosis. First of all, it turns out that Samhain was not a widespread phenomenon, and probably existed only within the Gaelic world - Ireland and Scotland. As time goes on, many of the traditional symbols of Samhain are falling victim to historical cleansing. Some newer scholarship goes as far as to suggest that there is no real evidence that Samhain was ever anything more than a regional harvest festival. Some writers suggest that all of the associations with death, ancestor worship, spirits, goblins, ghouls, costumes and trick or treat are the effects of the two Catholic-imposed holidays.

In light of this new information, its interesting that many public schools are eliminating Halloween parties because of their pagan associations, and substituting instead a harvest celebration, which turns out to be far more pagan than blood and gore Halloween imagery.

It is probably safe to say that, today, we simply can’t be sure which Halloween symbols are pagan, which ones are Catholic, and which should probably just be considered secular at this point. I hope that during the next few years the scholarship will sort itself out, and we will then be in a better position to evaluate all of the research.

Again, where does this leave the modern pagan? What are we to do with Samhain?

When we remember that we are part of nature, and not separate from it (as the Book of Genesis would have us believe), it makes sense that aligning ourselves with the cycles of the earth helps us to feel, literally, grounded. And because pagans view the divine as part of nature and part of the earth, aligning ourselves with nature helps us to feel closer to God.

Neo-pagan mythology often presents the turning of the seasons in terms of the life cycle of the God and Goddess. The God is often represented by the sun, the sky, and the wild places and wild animals of the earth. The Goddess is usually symbolized by the earth, the moon, the oceans, and domestic plants and animals.

At the winter solstice, the sun God is symbolically reborn from the earth Goddess. The light begins to grow stronger and the days get longer. If we were to take a page from nature’s book, at that time of year we would orient ourselves toward rebirth, beginning to turn outward and come out of our winter hibernation We would begin to look toward spring, and think about what new energies we would like to bring into our lives.

By May 1, the pagan holiday of Beltane, the mythology presents a newly pregnant Goddess, and a God who is at his sexual and fertile peak. In nature the earth is itself is pregnant, verdant and luxurious in its rampant growth. At this time of year we can naturally take advantage of the great growth energy surrounding us to strive forward toward completion of the projects we conceived at mid-winter.

August 1st, the holiday of Lammas, or Lughnassadh, brings us a God who has passed his peak of energy at the summer solstice, and is in decline. As the sun, he is expending his energy to nourish the earth and her inhabitants. He is sacrificing his energy and life for the sake of the Earth Goddess and her children. The shortening days call us to examine our lives and the role of sacrifice in them. It reminds us to think about service to others and to the earth.

By November 1st, Samhain, the God has given his all to the earth, and like the sun, is seen for fewer and fewer hours per day. He is near death. In the more northern latitudes, the sun actually disappears from the sky for weeks during the dead of winter, and in those parts of the world it is easy to imagine that the Sun God has actually died. All around us the world seems to be dying. Vegetation withers and turns brown, blowing away in the cold October winds. Birds fly south to escape approaching death. If we are tuned in to the earth and what is happening in nature, how can we help but think about death at this time of year?

Regardless of the Catholic-imposed meanings of the day, it simply makes sense to address the issue of death at this time of year. It is not, however, a celebration or glorification of death. Nor is it intended to be scary.

For the modern pagan, the most common themes of Samhain are

The end of the harvest season, in which the final harvest has been made and the fields burned over to release their energy to the earth.

Death as a part of the cycle of life.

Preparation for winter.

Because it’s commonly thought of as the "pagan new year," Samhain is an opportunity for New Year’s resolutions. We spend some time deciding what no longer serves us, so that we can burn over the emotional fields and return that energy to more useful pursuits. We also take time to remember and honor those who have come before us, and those loved ones who have died more recently. And we prepare for winter, both physically and emotionally.

Yes, we enjoy many of the traditions that might now be considered secular: Jack-o-lanterns, dressing up, bobbing for apples, trick or treating. We can’t really be sure whether they have any true basis in either pagan or Christian religion. But boy, they’re fun! And fun is a good thing.

The pagan experience of adjusting to changing history has something to teach everyone, not just about religion, but also about any long-held, precious belief. If it hasn’t happened already, someday your beliefs will be soundly challenged. Something that you have held as absolute truth will be stripped naked, and you will be forced to look at it in stark, unflattering light.

This is the time when you will need to take a deep breath, and keep your courage. Remember that every whole is made up of smaller parts. It will probably turn out that your newly desecrated belief was only part of a larger whole. Don’t make the mistake of turning your back on the greater whole. Find the parts that still make sense. Find the fragments that still give you joy. Remold them into a new set of beliefs.

In the spirit of Samhain, I invite you to examine those things – physical or philosophical, that no longer seem to serve you. Separate the weeds from the legitimate harvest. Gather the harvest to you, and leave the weeds behind. Set fire to the fields, knowing that what you have left behind and burned over will return its energy to the earth, where it will be available for new crops and new pursuits. Grow, change, adapt, and become stronger. Live your beliefs. Live your dreams.

Blessed be.

© 2002, Lorraine Ellis