Significant Irish Contributions to World Culture - No. 7641, Halloween

Halloween's Pagan Celtic Roots

Today Halloween is joyously celebrated by children across the Western world.
There is a popular misconception though that Halloween is a modern American invention. Not so. Though our American cousins have to be congratulated for making this very special festival a fantastic children-centric occasion nevertheless, as with so many other things that have brought great happiness and joy to humanity for millennia, its roots lay firmly in the culture of the Irish Celts!
(Photo- my son Dáire & 'friend'!)
Yet in the modern repackaging of this ancient pagan festival, many of the fine traditions that were once such an integral part of the festivities have disappeared. For instance our Celtic custom of placing human skulls with candles at entrances to domestic dwellings in order to ward off evil spirits has been replaced by lights in hollowed-out pumpkins! Likewise the visits of children dressed up in ghoulish and macabre fancy dress going door-to-door looking for gifts of sweets and fruits is a poor substitute for the former visits of the ghosts of our ancestors who used to drop in once a year on October 31st for a nice meal with their living relatives (we would prepare a place for them at the dinner table).
It was said too that live captives were placed in wicker cages above huge bonfires and burnt alive (as portrayed in the classic British 1970s cult film “The Wicker Man”). But such horror stories were originally spun by those nasty Romans when they were at war with the Celts. So it was probably nothing more than malicious enemy propaganda. After all, what do you take us Celts for? Barbarians?!!

As with so many other annual family festivals, Halloween has become so commercialised by 'Americanised' popular culture that its true origins and religious aspects have long since being forgotten.
So here is the true story of 'Féile na Marbh' (Festival of the Dead'):

Christianisation of 'Samhain'
Yet modern-day Americans were not the first people to re-brand the festival. In the middle ages the Catholic Church created the Christian festival of 'All Hallows Eve' or 'All Souls Day' when people were asked to remember and pray for their dead family members.
This event was superimposed onto the ancient pagan Celtic festival of 'Samhain' which marked the end of the summer season characterised by heat & light and the coming of the dark cold barren winter months.

Celtic Festivals
Typical of many agricultural societies, the Celts had four major annual festivals based on the cyclical differences experienced in the changing seasons of nature and their corresponding weather patterns. The other three were 'Imbolc' (spring) 'Bealtane' (summer), 'Lugnasa' (autumn). The latter was associated with harvest time.

Bon(e)Fires
Samhain was a time when food was hoarded as people prepared for the cold season when no plants grew. While many domestic animals such as cattle were brought indoors for the winter, others were slaughtered and most of their meat salted for storage whilst the remainder was cooked for the big feast. As with all Irish festivals, communal bonfires were lit as people gathered together at warm fires to socialise and to give thanks to the deities. Bones of the slaughtered animals were thrown into the fire as symbolic gifts to the gods, an action which give rise to the term ' bone fires' or 'bonfires'. Embers from this sacred fire were taken by local people to their households to light their own domestic fires.

Antecedents to the Pumpkin & 'Trick or Treat'
But Samhain was also a time when creatures from the supernatural world could enter into the world of mortals. 'Fairies' (Irish='Sidhe' as in ‘Banshee’/‘female fairy’) and the spirits of the dead would walk the earth. Many of these beings were benevolent and the spirits of dead ancestors; so families laid out extra food and set aside a table space for their ghostly visitors. This metaphorised into the custom of today's children dressing up as demons and witches & calling to the neighbours' houses to receive presents.
But there were spirits that came on the night of Samhain that were malevolent. Candles were placed in skulls at the entrance to dwellings as light was feared by these dark foreboding creatures. This protection against evil became transformed in modern times into the positioning of hollowed-out turnips and later pumpkins with carved out faces and internal candles at windows and doorways.
Centuries-old party games of trying to eat an apple lying in a basin of water ('bobbing') or dangling on a string tied to a ceiling ('snapping') are still popular festive past-times with Irish children.

The apple is probably the most common edible fruit in Ireland. It was also strongly associated with the spirit world and the fairies (sidhe). In the Arthurian legends, the mystical island of Avalon is where King Arthur obtains his magical sword Excalibur and where he is taken at the end of his life by the Lady of the Lake and her female fairy companions (banshee). Avalon comes from the Welsh word afal or Irish aball.

Fortune Telling at Halloween
Central to the Irish Halloween is the eating of a fruit bread known as 'Barmbrack' from the Gaelic term 'Báirín Breac' (speckled or spotted top). It is still a popular festive food today.
Various symbolic pieces were placed in the dough before it was baked such as a ring, a pea and a stick. When an item was found in the slice when it was being eaten, it told of the future that awaited the recipient. For instance, the 'ring' signified marriage within a year; a 'stick' represented a bad or violent marriage; the 'coin', wealth and a 'pea', a long wait before marriage.

Irish Export Halloween to North America
The Irish emigrants of the nineteenth century introduced Halloween and its rituals to America. Within a few decades, the festival was transformed into the fun and games event of today.

Significant Irish Contributions to World Culture:
No. 7642- 'Dracula'
Considering our national passion of asking the dead to resurrect themselves & drop into the house for a late night meal & party, it should come as no surprise that the world's most well known vampire Count Dracula was the creation of an Irishman, the novelist Bram Stoker in 1887.
His inspiration though was Carmilla, a book about a lesbian vampire created naturally enough(!) by another well known Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu.

(Photos from Macnas Halloween youth parade in Ballinfoile, Galway City)

This is the text of one of my previous posts that I think it is worth republishing at the time of the year that we celebrate the birth of a figure who preached tolerance, peace and love to all living things, but who ended up being tried as a threat to state and religion before being tortured to death.
Sadly his followers since have too often inexplicably used his name and teachings to kill and maim on all continents and in all centuries.
Just as astonishing is the fact that a modern day Jesus Christ from the biblical lands of Israel/ Palestine would more than likely be killed in his mother's womb or die a very young man.
For an evil stalks that blood-stained land masquerading on one side as "Allah" or "God's Will" and the other as "Defense of Democracy & Western Values" in a county known ironically as the 'Holy Land'.

Could the story of the Nativity happen today in Palestine? Unlikely.

For would a poor young unmarried teenage girl in the West Bank, who had just announced that she was pregnant, not become a victim of male ‘honour’?
Even if she did survive, she and her new husband would have found it extremely difficult to go from Nazareth to Bethlehem due to road-blocks and travel restrictions placed on local inhabitants by the occupying Israeli military; the shepherds would have probably lost their grazing lands to compulsory acquisition for the erection of the ‘Security Wall’ and Jewish colonial settlements and the three wise men from Iraq (Mesopotamia) would have being denied entry visas.
But even if the birth did manage to occur in Bethlehem, Israeli military border controls would have probably barred Mary’s family from crossing into Egypt to escape religious persecution thus sealing their faith.
Yet there is no doubt that an adult Jesus of the New Testament and of a modern Middle East would have ended their lives in a similar terrible fashion. For anyone preaching a message of peace and love, a call for people’s liberation from poverty and oppression, of respect for all races and creeds, of freedom for prisoners and an end to the oppression of women, would have made himself both an enemy of the state and of a religious fundamentalism that preaches intolerance towards non-believers and death to all blasphemers.
Yes, death would have come either from an American-made laser guided missile or from execution by a death squad after the customary gruesome torture.

Catholic Church Protected Evil & Condemned Children to Suffer Years of Sexual Abuse

Today was a landmark day for victims of the Catholic Church in Ireland with the publication of an independent Commission's report into child abuse in the archdiocese of Dublin from 1974 to 2004.
The report clearly shows that there was a deliberate cover up of clerical abuse by the Church authorities. The bishops saw their primary goal being to protect the financial assets and reputation of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. They gave no recognition of the sufferings being done to the children by their members. Those courageous few adults that tried to expose the evil being done by priests were condemned as liars and misfits. Time and time again, the ecclesiastical authorities malevolently moved the perpetrators away from the public glare to church positions in others parts of the country or abroad allowing them to continue to commit crimes against yet more innocent children.

'Above Suspicion'

The hierarchy openly felt that they were superior to the state and not accountable to civil law. Such a exalted opinion of themselves was probably shared by the majority of the populace for much of the 20th century who treated clerics as above suspicion because they were adjudged God's intermediaries. Certainly the police and other state institutions agreed, colluded with the cover-up and undertook no action when asked to do so by the victims.

Lack of 'Christianity' in the Catholic Church

As a practicing Christian and a lapsed member of the Catholic Church, it still astonishes me that the world's largest Christian church became so corrupt; that it deviated so much from the teachings of Christ; that it promoted, perpetuated and protected evil while preaching a message of 'love and peace to all mankind'; that clerics who took vows of chastity metamorphosed into serial paedophiles and rapists; that bishops, who were supposed to be followers of the Christ that lived the life of a pauper, lived in 'palaces' and called themselves 'princes'; that most priests and bishops, if not themselves practicing child abuse, knowingly turned a blind eye to these horrible acts and saw their role being to protect the perverts. By their actions and in-actions, they condemned generations of innocent children to a life of 'Hell on Earth'.

Condemned by the Bishop of Galway

In the early 1990s, I myself was publicly condemned by the then Bishop of Galway for allowing the sale of condoms on my pub premises. I was dismissed as a wrongdoer, as corrupting the morality of youth. The bishop said that I was ignoring a central tenet of church law which was that sex existed for 'procreation' and not for 'pleasure'. A few months after these attacks, the bishop fled Ireland when it was found out that he had a teenage child by his mistress! He was the first senior cleric to be exposed for having a sexual affair.
Click here to read more on this story.
I actually had and still have great respect for Bishop Casey. He was a good man on so many levels and I sure don't believe that having consensual sex with an adult woman is wrong.
Anyway, his actions paled into insignificance compared to what soon followed. It was only after the Casey affair, when the spotlight was turned for the first time onto the private lives of clerics, that it became public knowledge that hordes of rampant paedophiles were operating inside hallowed walls.
Today's report though dealt solely with a 30 year period in one archdiocese in Ireland. We can be sure that such abuse happened from the time that the Catholic Church began to monopolise power in the country (19th century) and when it was given responsibility for the physical and spiritual care of young people and the right to establish orphanages and schools. It is also true that this evil was exported to all areas of the world where Irish priests established missions, schools and churches.
This clerical wickedness has done so much to undermine the great acts of goodness and charity carried out by other Irish nuns, brothers and priests. But power and privilege as well as blind obedience to their whims by the populace turned too many of the clerics into monsters.

Time for Renewal

The Church must immediately undergo a period of renewal and return to living the teachings of Christ by fully embracing Liberation Theology and promoting Environmentalism. The Papal Nuncio, who refused to reply to the letters from the Commission, must be expelled from the country; the Pope must issue a public apology to the people of Ireland; the hierarchy should leave their 'Palaces' and cease to be known as 'Princes' or be addressed by aristocratic titles such as 'Your Grace' or 'Your Eminence'; celibacy for clerics should be optional and women should be admitted to the priesthood. For a male-only institution, which is against all the laws of nature, obviously became a breeding ground for paedophilia.

German Bishops Compare Palestine to Jewish Ghettos of Nazi Europe

Well Done to the German Bishops who had the courage this week to publicly declare the obvious truth- that Israel's brutal racist militaristic actions and policies were deliberately converting Palestine into a series of walled-off over-crowded poverty stricken Ghettos that were reminiscent of the Jewish ghettos of Nazi-occupied Europe.
It is a courage that Western and other political world leaders lack.
The bishops were on a visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Bishop Hanke of Eichstatt was quoted in the Irish Times as stating that, "This morning we saw pictures of the Warsaw ghetto at Yad Vashem (Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem) and this evening we are going to the Ramallah ghetto"
Cardinal Meisner of Cologne said, in referring to the heavy Israeli military presence, their checkpoints and their 26ft security wall being built through Arab lands, that it was "something done to animals not people".
Bishop Mixa of Augsburg pointed out that Israeli policies towards Palestinians bordered on racism.

It is despicable that the world's nations allow Israel to continue with this barbarism.
Today, film evidence was broadcast on BBC television showing that Israeli troops continue to use children and young people as human shields as they rampage through Palestinian homes and streets.

See my previous article on Israeli aggression entitled 'Time for the Israeli Myth to be Shattered'