The battle between Halloween and Reformation Day

The sun deity Beaivi withholds her rays in October, particularly in northern Norway, where in 1674 a beggar named Kirsten Iversdatter was tied to the stake. She was accused of witchcraft, not only because of her itinerant lifestyle and rumors of promiscuity, but also because of the pagan faith of the Sámi, the persecuted indigenous minority to which she belonged. Sixty-five years earlier, King Christian IV of Denmark – a staunch Lutheran – had decreed that “Sámi witchcraft should be mercilessly persecuted.” In the fading autumn twilight, the burning of Iversdatter would light up this ice-cold city.

According to one calendar coincidence, it was on the last day of this month nearly a century and a half earlier – Halloween 1517 – when Martin Luther made his protest, marking the symbolic beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Among Lutherans and Reformed churches, major Protestants and evangelicals, this day marks separation from the papacy, the supposed return to Scripture and faith, the rejection of superstition and idolatry. What is officially celebrated as “Reformation Day” in several German cantons and by dozens of different Protestant denominations often serves as a replacement for Halloween, this holiday that is irrevocably linked to Celtic and Germanic paganism. For those believers who recognize October 31st as Reformation Day, Luther's hammer blow against the wooden door of Wittenberg Cathedral meant not only a break with Rome, but the final break with Europe's pagan past, a victory for Christianity against what was considered is vilified as dark and demonic, wanton and witch-like. In a secular cultural sense, it could be seen as a victory of ethics, rationality and faith – the qualities that could be said to have led directly to the development of capitalism, democracy and scientific thought – over the realm of fantasy, of emotions etc. see magic.

But this victory of Protestantism over paganism was far from complete. Centuries before Luther, Europe's conversion to Christianity was hardly seamless and occurred in phases even after Emperor Theodosius I made the faith the official faith of the Roman Empire in 380. Lithuania, for example, was notoriously late in this regard, only becoming officially Christian more than a millennium later, in 1387. Particularly among the humanists of the Renaissance, especially the painter Piero di Cosimo, the reverence for the classical pantheon remained.

In 1921, Margaret Murray, an Egyptologist with no particular knowledge of early modern history, even argued in the controversial if influential study The witch cult in Western Europe that religious persecution in the 16th and 17th centuries actually served to exterminate adherents of a continental crypto-pagan faith devoted to the worship of a “horned god” who had survived in secret. Later historians such as Hugh Trevor-Roper and Keith Thomas disputed much of the evidence Murray gathered, but a more charitable interpretation of her work is that it was not so much wrong as overstated. One might say that a pagan does not have to know that he is a pagan – even if his opponent does.

In 1983, for example, the distinguished Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, relying in part on the vast and hitherto limited archives of the Vatican Library, argued that there was a kernel of truth in Murray's hypothesis The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the 16th and 17th Centuries. Ginzburg examines the commonalities in beliefs about witchcraft and the witches' Sabbath in various locations of these “faint traces of myths” and concludes that they are remnants of older traditions that “may have been widespread in an earlier period over a much larger period of time must”. Area.”

Reformation Day continues to mark the erasure of a pagan past that Halloween – which grew out of the Celtic festival of Samhain – embodies. But fortunately, as the endurance of folk or non-Christian faith – whether the rituals of the Sámi or the playful grin of the jack-o'-lantern – shows, these essential energies of mysticism and magic can never be fully contained, the great Horned God has never been completely controlled by organized religion defeated.