A festive and pagan revival for some, a Trojan horse of “American cultural imperialism” for others, Halloween, a paganist celebration, does not leave one indifferent. The Catholic Church, moved by the “harmful influence” of the bacchanal, even created “Holyween” (evening of prayers in response), in order to sweep away the stories of witches.
The first interest of Halloween is the plurality of analyzes to which this “pagan neo-rite” gives rise.
Halloween marks the return of “old moons” and forgotten holidays, or which were simply dormant… waiting to be exhumed in some way. Its origins are both Celtic and Mexican. Originally, the same desire to celebrate the dead, and also to manifest one’s conjuring fear, before entering winter and the cycle of short nights, an anxiety-provoking period if ever there was one.
Death as a continuation of life
The Spanish conquistadors discovering Mexico were impressed by an Aztec ritual practiced for a very long time and which seemed sacrilegious to them. Because, unlike the Spaniards who saw death as the end of life, the Aztecs considered it its continuation. They kept skulls as trophies and displayed them during these festivals to symbolize rebirth and to honor the dead who they believed returned to visit at this time of year. Unable to eliminate this rite, the Spaniards fixed the date at the same time as that of a Christian festival: All Saints’ Day.
It’s the Day of the Dead, El Día de los Muertos. It is a joyous celebration, a time when the souls of those who have departed come to visit the living. This festival lasts two days, the 1ster and November 2.
From an anthropological point of view, Halloween expresses anxieties at work in all societies, even the most seemingly rational.
On this occasion, Mexicans build altars in memory of those they loved and leave offerings on their graves. Many public places are decorated with ironic representations of death, skeletons dancing and singing like living people, exotic and moving avatars of medieval dances of death. These haunting processions were immortalized (so to speak) by the impressive opening of the James Bond film released in 2016, Spectrum.
It is on a similar mythical and festive basis that European Halloween developed. It was still a question of celebrating the deceased by parodying death in the form of squash. The rite is in all respects pagan, and it is understandable that it could not be in the odor of holiness: we loudly celebrate the dead and witches, we play to scare ourselves, we make up frightening faces.
Across the Atlantic, this festival has been celebrated for a long time, since it was imported by the first immigrants in the 17the century. Every October 31, children dressed as witches, ghosts and ghosts wander in small groups through the streets of their neighborhoods. They ring the doorbells of houses and demand treats, shouting “trick or treat” (“a favor or a curse”).
In exchange for small gifts, these children, whose frightening masks symbolize lost souls, guarantee peace and quiet to the homes they visit. Halloween has a strong emblem, these hollowed out, toothless pumpkins filled with candles, which displayed in windows and shop windows, give the evening its disturbing, unreal and morbid side.
A rite of reversal
From an anthropological point of view, Halloween expresses anxieties at work in all societies, even the most seemingly rational: the fear of death and the exorcization of it via ritualized practices, during a conjuring festive interlude. Thus, the masks represent ghosts and ghosts, at a time of year when winter and night settle in for a few long months. In the spirit, it is a question of adapting to the sphere of the dead, of making a pact with them, through offerings and disguises. The rite dramatizes these fears: it gives them a parodic turn which, in a given parenthesis, constitutes a relief.
Even in its contemporary form, Halloween continues to be essentially a rite of inversion, since it is the night when everything is overturned, inverted, starting with the relations of authority. Parents play the role of dupes, encouraging their children to beg for and eat treats, going against the principles of politeness and moderation instilled in ordinary times.
Making children the main actors of Halloween is very American: this results in a playful, neo-pagan and scripted version, a carnivalesque interlude de-dramatizing the ambiguous relationship that this society maintains with death and the afterlife.
It only returned to the Old Continent relatively recently, at the turn of the centuries. It seems that there are several reasons for this (un)expected return to favor.
A “marketed” party
For several years, Halloween has been accompanied by significant media and advertising promotion, partly carried out by American firms, against a backdrop of menus, gifts, events and special evenings. For traders, on the lookout for special days promoting thematic decoration and promotions, it constitutes an ideal time, between the end of summer and the end-of-year holiday period.
Our productivist society, which no longer has time to stop for a few days to celebrate, has invented new types of short, playful, cutesy and kitsch links.
And God in all this? With Halloween, it is about rites, myths, deaths, the supernatural after all. The sacred halo surrounds this festival with its pale nimbus. And it is important to note that this day adjoins two other celebrations of the dead and of remembrance, since it intervened between All Saints’ Day and November 11; to slowly replace them by phagocytosing them in the minds of younger generations. For young children, Halloween is spontaneously “the day of the dead”.
The emergence of Halloween confirms that an economic and/or neo-pagan calendar replaces traditional religious and republican festivals, or carves out a place alongside them. More broadly, this confirms the globalization of many holidays, while Chinese New Year is increasingly celebrated here, and Christmas is a real success in many Asian countries.
Little pagan carnivals
Deploring (for conservatives) this shift from religion to the broader sphere of the sacred, or its renunciation into “neo-paganism”, does not serve much purpose. The evolution of the notion of celebration, of the sacred, of rites are much more interesting questions. Our productivist society, which no longer has time to stop for a few days to celebrate, has invented new types of short, playful, cutesy and kitsch links (Valentine’s Day).
All these pagan neo-rites last only one evening. Traditional rites required time, a specific, long and slow time. Thus, Carnival, and its week of celebrations and festivities. Halloween or Beaujolais are small autumnal carnivals allowing at little cost (one evening) a gap of jubilation, sharing and laughter in a gloomy and cold start to winter.
But the grotesque and the morbid claimed by Halloween, marrying the fascination of the time for zombies and the living dead (see the success of The Walking Dead and the revival horror films) cover a deeper disguise.
For one evening, the generations mingle and play together, pretending to feel frightened, while expressing in this “deep game” something obscure, mixing laughter and anguish, fear and joy; something precisely anthropological, questioning the deep structures and the symbolic systems allowing them to be read implicitly.
