|
Ask the average North
American citizen what holiday comes to mind when thinking of Witches and
Halloween will surely be the answer. Ask the same person what significance
Halloween has for them, and they might get nostalgic about harvest festivals,
fireworks, bobbing for apples and memories of Trick or Treating as children.
If the person that you are asking is a fundamentalist Christian, they may try
to convince you that Halloween is a Satanic holiday. Ask the average police
officer what Halloween means to them and they’ll probably tell you that it is
a night of non-stop mayhem. I first experienced this on a rainy Samhain night
in 1977. It was on that evening that yours truly, a police recruit fresh out
of the academy, worked in Skid Row with his field trainer, Constable Lou
Darby. We started the shift by responding to investigate the report of a
fight at a beer parlor at the Brandiz Hotel. The next call involved
apprehending a brawling, bloody, mentally disturbed man. This call ended in a
“big blue dog pile” and a Mental Health Act arrest. The evening ended with
the arrest of an impaired driver who had driven across a T-intersection into
the concrete barrier on the other side.
Being a Witch, I would rather
have been doing other things on October 31. Samhain, as we Witches call it,
is an important festival for us: It is our New Years celebration. It is when
we remember our dear departed friends and relatives with ceremonies such as
the Dumb Supper: A feast that is consumed in silence by the celebrants.
Police departments, however, are 24-7 operations. Senior officers have earned
the holiday privileges, so junior officers work on holidays. Not that October
31 is a statutory holiday. It is just that most senior cops would probably
rather stay at home with their families on this night than deal with the
Halloween mayhem at work. In those early years of my
police career I had to work at Samhain. As the years marched on, Halloweens
got progressively busier. I can remember a non stop night of car chases in
1985. My colleagues and I seized large quantities of liquor and fireworks from
unruly teens that night. I can remember successive years of increasingly
riotous evenings: Gangs of youths upending vehicles and committing vandalism
and arson in school yards and parks. This culminated in my police department
canceling leaves and fielding four man patrol units in 1994 in an attempt to
put a stop to such activity. This violence and disorder on
October 31 was especially disturbing to me. How did this particular date end
up meaning so many different things to so many different people? Why did so
many people use this day as an excuse for lawlessness? Why did so many people
then blame Wiccans for this? All Saints Day is a day
commemorating the saints of the church, commencing in 609 CE when Pope
Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome as a church in honor of the
Blessed Virgin and all martyrs. This Christian festival was originally
celebrated on the 13th of May. During the reign of Pope Gregory III (731-741)
the date of this celebration was changed to November 1st. Gregory announced
this change while dedicating a chapel in St. Peters in Rome to all saints.
Pope Gregory IV ordered the general observance of All Saints Day in 837. The
name Halloween is derived from one of the alternate names of this Christian
festival: All Hallows Eve. One of the reasons that the
Church moved the festival of All Saints to this particular date was that it
would then coincide with a pre-existing Pagan festival. That ancient festival
was Samhain or . The Samhain celebration is the source of much of the modern folklore
surrounding the holiday of Halloween. All Saints was moved to this
date because the church wanted to give people a new reason to celebrate on
this day: An alternative to the Pagan festival of the dead. Following the
Celtic practice of reckoning days as starting at sunset, the festival of Samhain
commences at sunset on October 31 and continues until the following sunset on
November 1. Hence the church placed the festival on November 1. The older
Pagan celebrations were actively discouraged if not banned outright. The
church tolerated no rivals. Halloween was described as a season of fear and
ghosts instead of as the festival of remembrance that it was for Pagans. There are more strange urban legends
connected with October 31st than any other Sabbat in the Wiccan
calendar. It’s a lengthy list and I
won’t attempt to go into it here. I’ve
documented these urban legends in my book Witch Hunts and in the Witch Hunts
series on the Witchvox web site:
http://www.witchvox.com/_x.html?c=whs It was this evangelical propaganda that
changed many people’s perceptions about Halloween. Thus it is not surprising
that Halloween and the days immediately following it became Mischief Night: A
time for pranks, mischief and mayhem. Many of those revelers who turn riotous
on Halloween night probably believe that this is a supposed to be a night of
anarchy devoted to the Devil. If they needed an excuse for their debauchery,
this situation is ready made. The tragic thing for us Wiccans is that the
same people who created the misinformation about Samhain being a Satanic
holiday then take the news reports of lawlessness and blame it on Wiccans who
had nothing to do with it. A Halloween incident later in my career underlined this situation for me.
It demonstrated to me how people are sometimes reluctant to give up long
standing beliefs. Change is something that many people resist. The belief
that Witches are ugly, evil women is one of these beliefs that people seem to
cling to. Around Samhain, 1999, I was attending a training session at the old Main Street police station. When I arrived early that morning, I discovered that the staff had decorated the lobby of this station for Halloween. Most of the decorations were fairly innocuous: Jack O'Lanterns and pictures of ghosts and black cats. Yet one decoration immediately caught my eye. This was sup |
Samhain
|
|
e-mail: webmaster@officersofavalon.com |
|
To contact us: |
|
This violence and
disorder on October 31 was especially disturbing to me. How did this
particular date end up meaning so many different things to so many different
people? |
|
Dispatches: Volume 1 No. 6 Samhain/Calan Gaef/Einherjar 2006 |
|
Ask the average police officer what
Halloween means to them and they’ll probably tell you that it is a night of
non-stop mayhem |
