Restoring Hallowe'en?

Our Damian has a lovely bad-tempered piece here about Auntie's take on Hallowe'en yesterday.

Utterly fawning coverage from the BBC of the pagan festival of Halloween or “Samhain”, including an interview with a chief pagan in a sheepskin. “We’ll be continuing with our coverage throughout the day, watching the celebration of the most important festival of the pagan year,” we’re promised.

I don't know where the idea comes from that Hallowe'en is a pagan festival. Of course, it isn't. As the name suggests, it is in fact the Eve of the Catholic Feast of All Saints (which is today). But then modern, moderate Protestants don't really believe in Saints - what with salvation being sola fide, and all those snide condemnations of "idolatry" - and so they're also a bit squeamish about death in a way that Catholics used not to be. (The same goes for Poverty, which Jesus always taught was a Good Thing but which is now a Bad Thing.) The result has thus been a lumping together of mediaeval Catholic Hallowe'en traditions with all manner of old-fashioned superstitious mumbo-jumbo that modern, sensible Protestants don't like.

The modern Catholic Church for its part is of course hopelessly confused about the whole thing. (Now there's a surprise!) You'll still hear some Catholic churchmen, against all the folkloric, mythological, theological and historical evidence, continuing to insist that Hallowe'en is pagan or "anti-Christian" - which certainly shouldn't surprise, given that Catholic churchmen have been taking their lead zombie-like from their protestant "brethren" for nearly two generations now. Others, meanwhile, have been trying to "reclaim" it. And this year indeed it's been de facto abolished altogether.

Of course if they really wanted to "reclaim" Hallowe'en the most obvious thing to do would be to restore the old Catholic traditions of Britain and Ireland that were abolished (in Britain, at any rate) with the Protestant Revolt. Trick-or-treating weirds me out, I must confess, so why not take the children souling? (The Pinky Fuzzy Slipper Writers blog has the recipe for the cakes here.) Why not revive porch watching, with Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament until midnight? Such restorations are not complicated, but they would require a very different attitude to traditions (and tradition generally) on the the part of English Catholics.

Going back to Good Ole Damian, though, he can't resist a lovely bit of batty esotericism of his own, complaining not just about eco-feminist Lefty Lezzers but also about

the overlap between paganism and various forms of Satanism – or the much broader overlap with the far Right. In northern Europe, some pagan movements have celebrated Aryan cultural and racial purity for the best part of a century. In the words of the historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, author of a brilliant study of the Neo-Nazi movement entitled Black Sun, Nordic racial paganism or Odinism is a “spiritual rediscovery of the Aryan ancestral gods … intended to embed the white races in a sacred worldview that supports their tribal feeling”, and expressed in “imaginative forms of ritual magic and ceremonial forms of fraternal fellowship”.

What would we do without him?