By Susan Jordan
Halloween wasn’t always about vampire movies and little kids collecting mass quantities of Snickers and Kit Kats. However, Trick or Treat and the costumes, Jack O’Lanterns, black cats and other motifs have been part of the seasonal tradition for a long, long time. Queer folks have loved the holiday for a long time as well, if only because it gave them a chance to be openly fabulous and outrageous and get away with it. The Greenwich Village Halloween Parade has grown larger and larger over the years.
The holiday known to Christians as All Saints or All Souls or Hallows Eve or Hallow E’en was originally a pagan festival of death – and of renewal. To the ancient Celts, it was Samhain, when the spirits of ancestors revisited the family hearth, when destructive spirits had to be appeased and when troupes of priestesses rode through the night, bringing blessings to households that put out food and drink for them. To the Celts, Halloween was not the end but the beginning of the cycle of the year.
Pre-Christian religions of Europe, with their reverence for a female diety and for women as spiritual leaders, were erased, and their memory has been demonized for centuries by Christian churches. Since the 19th century, the American Halloween, imported by Irish and Scottish immigrants, has become secularized, a game for children. Finally, today’s combination of fundamentalism with an ultra-right wing political movement has resulted in attempts to ban the holiday, or in really evil and frightening “Haunted Houses” sponsored by the fundamentalist right, which depict gay people as “evil” and as justly suffering the Father God’s revenge in the form of AIDS.
Once upon a time, thousands of years ago, humanity lived in harmony with Earth and Nature – not as alienated “super-beings” seeking to own and control them. Life, death, the seasons and the cosmos were seen as an eternal Spiral, moving from birth to fulfillment to death and then starting all over again. This Spiral was symbolized by the cycle of the Triple Goddess of the moon, who moves from crescent to full and then wanes again, only to be re-born each month. Triads of goddesses and fate priestesses are found throughout European folklore, going back to the ancient Greek/Anatolian Great Goddess Artemis, whose Maiden form was Latona and whose Crone form was Hekate Trivia (“of the Three Ways” – turned by patriarchs into “trivial”).
As the Maiden or Birth Virgin, her youthful Crescent Moon aspect, the Goddess gave birth in the Underworld each winter solstice to the new sun. The Maiden’s silver fir tree became our “Christmas Tree”. She miraculously renewed her virginity each year.
The Celtic calendar’s next sacred festival was Imbolc, Feb. 1-2, the festival of light, called Candlemas by the Christians. Imbolc marked the beginning of the return of sunlight to the earth. It was the season when ewes gave birth to lambs, a crucial moment for pastoral societies dependent on their herds.
Imbolc heralded the spring equinox in March and then the sacred feast of Beltain on April 31-May 1. Beltain was the spring equivalent of Samhain. It celebrated sexuality and the life force. Like Imbolc and the other Celtic fire festivals (Samhain and Lughnasad), Beltain was marked by bonfires and dancing.
At Beltain, the Maiden/Birth Virgin aspect of the Goddess gave way to the Bride, the mature and sexual woman of the Full Moon. Bride comes from Brigid, the Goddess of fire, poetry, healing, metal crafts and life-giving sexuality, who was later changed to “St. Brigid”. She came into her own at the Midsummer Eve festival, held at the summer solstice on June 20 or on Old Midsummer Eve, June 24.
Harvest was celebrated at Lughnasad or Lammas, Aug. 1-2. (Lugh was a form of the male deity in Ireland). At this time, the Bride becomes the Seelie Woman – the Wise Woman who presides over the harvest. The period between Aug. 1 and Halloween was known as “The Seelie Woman’s Season”. Woman-hating patriarchy turned “seelie” (“pious, holy, blessed, harvest”) into “silly”.
At Halloween, the Bride became the Winter Hag, the crone of the Waning Moon who brings the snowfall, protects children and the creatures of the wilderness, and rules the underworld of the dead, specifically megalithic standing stones, barrows and passage graves. The Hag can be a wise and gentle advisor to farmers, the protector of animals and small children, and/or the terrifying Fate priestess who represents death. She imprisons her youthful aspect, the Maiden, in the Underworld. But they are essentially One, like the Greek Two Ladies, Demeter and Persephone.
The Hag’s connection with the forest and with deer in particular indicate that she was originally a pre-agricultural diety, dating to the Paleolithic (Old Stone Age), before humanity grew crops or settled in towns, and before the Neolithic stone circles were erected. She is the original Faery Godmother. “Faery” is derived from fata, Latin for “Fate”. The Fate priestess not only presided over death rites; she also was a midwife and healer who helped pregnant women give birth and forecast the future of their babies.
It took patriarchy, whether pagan or Christian, to re-define this being as the stereotypical Evil Old Woman or Toothmother, opponent of the “benevolent” male god of war. “Witch” may be related to wic, “alive” (as in “the cwic/quick and the dead”) and/or to the root for “wise”. Sadly, over a thousand years after the fall of the Old Faith, people are still programmed to define “witch” as evil.
After the rise of patriarchy, witches and all women were demonized, and countless numbers of women were murdered by the witch hunters of the Christian era. In some European villages only two or three women were left alive after the witch hunters had passed through. Some of the victims may have been genuinely evil sorcerers; others were wise women who healed and comforted and cast spells for good crops and weather, as their foremothers had for millennia; while still others were actually Christians who were not connected to pagan survivals at all – but just being female was crime enough. Old women, unmarried women and wealthy women (whose estates could be seized by the witch hunters) were frequent victims.
Gay men were persecuted too. One story has it that they were used as “faggots” (wooden sticks) to kindle the witch-pyres.
While ancient European religions may have emphasized the female, male deities were also important — men and male sexuality and vitality played important roles in the Goddess faith. The Celtic god of the Wilderness was Cernunnos, the Horned God whom Christianity changed into “Old Horny” the devil. The horned god goes back to the stag-antlered dancing shamans of Paleolithic cave paintings.
Today scholars doubt that there was ever a Matriarchy corresponding to the Patriarchy that has now dominated society for over 2,000 years. The Old Faith seems to have been a system in which power was not determined by gender.
In today’s climate of fundamentalist intolerance, disenfranchised women, gay men and queers of all types must struggle to take pride in themselves and to avoid internalizing the hatred of bigots and of the ignorant. Repressive, guilt-ridden views on sexuality are part of the reason why gay people experience discrimination and oppression as “sexual outlaws”. Those repressive views come right out of the early Christian reaction to the older, body-positive religions against which Christianity competed. If we want to resist the oppression we experience today, we need to understand the past and how demonization of women and fear of sexuality form the basis for today’s neurotic heterosexism.
Lucie Tapahonso, a Native American poet, talks about Ancient Values — the values and traditions that kept humanity alive and in harmony with Nature for millennia. Ancient Values are the antithesis of “Traditional Values” – the patriarchal worldview that is actually against life and against Nature. When the moon rises this Halloween, we Hags, Maidens, Seelie Women and Merry (Mary) Men can proudly celebrate our survival and renew those Ancient Values of life and harmony.