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Being Catholic #390: The Death of Halloween: How Carnival Became Commerce · Catholic Spirit Radio

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This is Being Catholic with Bob Johnston on Catholic Spirit Radio.
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Hi, this is Bob Johnston, and you're listening to Being Catholic right here
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on Catholic Spirit Radio, 89.5 FM and 92.5 FM in good old McLean County and
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Bloomington Normal, 88.3 in Pontiac,
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89.1 in DeKalb-Sycamore, 88.9 in the Rockford area, Marengo,
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Harvard, and Beloit, 94.5 in the Rockford proper town, 88.3 in Clinton and Champaign.
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90.5 in Charleston, covering much of central and northern Illinois and growing thanks to you.
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And now we are going to be starting also a station in Macomb,
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which will be coming on the air.
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It is on the air. Or it is on the air. Okay, I'm wrong. Then I guess it is on the air already.
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And probably I'm wrong because we have missed about the last month here, haven't we, Lynn?
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Seems like it. It seems as if I was going to— One thing after another.
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Yeah, I was going to do the Halloween show. Remember I told everybody? Yeah.
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I'm going to quit announcing things ahead of time because I said I wanted to do that Halloween show.
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And I said we were going to do it. And then John had to go up to Whitewater,
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Wisconsin. No, it wasn't Whitewater. No, Harvard.
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That's right. John had to go up to Harvard. We had to do some troubleshooting
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up there. We weren't able to do it that weekend.
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The next weekend was our drive, and we weren't able to do it that weekend.
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And then the weekend after, I think one of us, somebody had a cold or something
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like that, and we missed.
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And then John had to go back up to Harvard again. And this is one of the reasons,
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by the way, why we need your help so much, because a lot of our equipment is used equipment.
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There are things that go wrong, and it takes both time and money to keep the
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equipment in shape and keep it going.
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So whatever you can donate is always used, and it's always used very efficiently by John.
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And so don't forget to make a donation today, large or small, whatever you can give.
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But that's some of the reasons why we were gone for the last month or so here. And John has been busy.
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And we have a station up and running now in Macomb. And we were working on that.
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That's another thing we were working on.
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But I'm going to still do that whole Halloween show anyway. We're going to do it today.
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Yes, and it's appropriate still because it's still November.
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That's true. You know, we honored the dead in November.
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So we're going to have a great show. And as you've heard just my wife talking,
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I'm here with my wife, Lynn.
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And again, remember, as I've just said, it's always brought to you by you.
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And you make it possible for us to get stations online, to keep those stations
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running. And we need your donations coming in.
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And there are some future things coming up that we may be able to take advantage of here.
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And for all of that, it takes work and it takes money.
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And you make it possible for us. So, again, make a donation right now if you can.
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Go to our website, catholicspiritradio.com. Again, that's catholicspiritradio.com.
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If you can't do it that way, you can call us, 309-807-2427.
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Again, 309-807-2427. Give us a call.
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You can make a donation that way. But one way or another, make a donation and
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help keep the station going because it brings you a lot of information and a
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lot of good programs and so forth.
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And look at how many universities we're reaching.
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That's right. We're reaching, what, about six? Yes. So, in all of these towns.
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Including the U of I and University of Wisconsin up in Whitewater and,
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well, not Bradley. Northern. Northern. Eastern.
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And we're Western now. Mm-hmm. And so, the ISU right here in our area.
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So, yeah, reaching a lot of universities and we need to reach these young kids
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because they need to hear our messaging because they're hearing a lot of things
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that are exactly the opposite.
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And so these things are something that are important.
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Certainly are. We've got a lot of young souls.
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At any rate, I'm going to read an article here, and we'll talk a little bit about it, too.
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And it's from First Things Magazine, the November 2025 issue.
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It's called The Death of Halloween by Justin Lee, and he is an associate editor
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of First Things Magazine.
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And so I'll begin reading it. Is there anything else that you have to say,
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Lynn? No, no, let's get going because there's a lot to cover. Yes, there is.
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It says here, I fell in love with Autumn as a child. As a season of transition,
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autumn is more profound than spring for its melancholy.
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It spoke directly to my soul.
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Autumn also meant Halloween. And it goes on here, he says, I have never experienced
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the real Halloween, though.
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The night of drunken carousing that
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now passes for Halloween bears little resemblance to the festival of old.
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Like spiders slurping the innards of a beetle, disenchantment and commercialization
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have bled it of meaning, and yet the carpace remains.
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Halloween's history is a signal case of the process by which Western institutions
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descend into decadence.
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All that is meant by decadence is falling off, writes Jacques Barzun in his
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magisterial history of Western culture, From Dawn to Decadence.
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It implies in those who live in such a time, no loss of energy or talent or moral sense.
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On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep concerns,
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but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance.
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The loss it faces is that of possibility. The forms of art, as of life,
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seem exhausted. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result.
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This falling off is unmistakable throughout our cultural institutions.
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They have lost their animating force. That is the spirit of play.
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Go ahead. I'm sorry. No, that just seems to be.
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It's so commercial and organized. Play is the genesis of myth and ritual and
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all that flows from them.
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Without the play impulse, there would be no culture, no civilization, and no language.
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If we agree with Plato that we should live out our lives playing.
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Then the life of diminished play must be a noble, something less than fully human.
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And what they mean here by play, I think, Lynn, in what we're talking about,
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especially with Halloween and even in the church, is that sense of magical differentness,
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maybe supernaturalness, the sense of specialness and so forth that Halloween
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once had and many of our other holidays once had.
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But even Christmas, for example, used to take on a special time.
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The nights seemed different.
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Things seemed different. People did things together.
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And the air seemed electric with the possibility and with something that might happen and so forth.
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And I think it's become flatter and duller and just more ritualized and the
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same and commercialized and so forth.
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And that's what I think he means by the loss of plague. I think mystical is gone. Yeah.
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In the sense of inversion, that is taking all of the norms of society and suspending
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them for a night or two and having them sort of almost backwards sometimes or upside down.
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All people, no more rank or classes, you know, all of that being abolished and
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people doing things together from high to low and so forth.
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All believing in the same thing. It's coming together as a people,
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coming together as people who are believers in the same thing and hold the same ideas.
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In my opinion, if anything is demonic, it's this idea of celebrate diversity is demonic.
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If we agree with Plato that we should live out our lives playing,
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then the life of diminished play must be a noble, something less than fully human.
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Today, Western civilization is dying because we no longer play at culture.
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Lacking degenerative powers of play, cultural forms and institutions are capable
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only of decadent repetition.
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We possess neither the playfulness proper to us as humans, nor the reverence
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proper to us as creatures made in God's image.
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As incapable of true play, as of true seriousness, we are less than bestial, for even animals play.
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Halloween originated in the Christian feasts of all saints and all souls.
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In the Catholic Church, All Saints Day commemorates the Church triumphant,
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all those baptized believers who have obtained perfect union with God in heaven,
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with a special emphasis placed on those canonized by the Church.
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The observance of All Saints Day on November 1st can be traced to the mid-8th
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century, when Pope Gregory III shifted the date from May 13th.
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In Eastern traditions, it is still observed in the spring, after Pentecost.
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The linked feast of All Souls Day commemorates the baptized souls in purgatory, the Church penitent.
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Though both days were opportunities for remembering departed loved ones,
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All Souls Day featured intercessory prayers for those being refined in purgatory.
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Rituals of intercession underlie a few recognizable contemporary Halloween practices.
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All Saints and All Souls Day, known together in England as Hallowtide,
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were among the most important dates in the liturgical year by the end of the Middle Ages.
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Hallowtide was a period during which the faithful expected an increase of supernatural activity.
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And that's the thing that I think we don't have that expectation anymore.
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Well, yeah.
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We don't even have the Requiem Mass anymore. No. Both the evil and the benevolent kind.
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Church bells, believed to drive away demons, told all night.
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Many people, now we can't even ring our church bells, can we,
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Lynn? No, not normal. Right.
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And even the trains coming through can't blow their whistles anymore.
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I mean, it's sort of crazy, isn't it? They're supposed to come through at 80 miles an hour.
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I don't think any have. but if they ever do, I mean, I think it'd be a good
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idea to have whistles at the whistle signs in case people might be on the tracks.
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Many people anticipated visitations of the ghosts of loved ones and set extra
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places at the dinner table or left food and drink out at night,
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a tradition that lives on in the ofrendas of Mexico's Dia de los Muertos celebration.
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Because All Saints and All Souls Day reinforced the living owed the dead.
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Hallowtide was a means of preserving a community's historical consciousness.
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These festivals reminded people that they were a people, that they were connected
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as kin to others materially through time and space and spiritually in the mystical body of Christ.
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And that's what I was we had earlier, that through this sense of play,
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through this sense of magic and mystical in this specialty and night and the
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changing of norms and, you know, the inversion of the norms and so forth for certain special times,
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we came together as a people and understood who and what we were.
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And we have lost a lot of this in this nonsense of constant celebrate diversity
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until everybody goes his own way and becomes sort of like a whole universe to himself.
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Yeah, and the universe revolves around people that think that way.
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Exactly, this I, I, I, I, I.
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This quality of historical continuity, of duty to one's ancestors and descendants.
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You know, this is what G.K. Chesterton called the democracy of the dead.
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That's why he became Catholic. He said one of the reasons was because it preserves
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the democracy of the dead.
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We're in contact with our ancestors. and some of the things that they believed
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and handed on to us count.
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It says that the historical continuity was essential to Halloween for most of its existence.
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But during the last century or so, Halloween has been robbed of this virtue.
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So, you know, and we are becoming less and less a people here in the United
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States and perhaps in England and in Christianity, probably around the world to a certain extent.
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A common but mistaken narrative presents Halloween as a Christianization of
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the ancient pagan festival of Samhain.
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Though there is little evidence of a cynical campaign by the Church to appropriate
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Samhain, after the dates of All Saints' and All Souls' days were moved to November 1st and 2nd,
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elements of both traditions naturally merged.
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And today, eclos of Samhain are easily discerned in Halloween.
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Simply not because the church was trying to merge the two or the church was
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trying to incorporate Samhain, but because they have similarities.
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A Celtic harvest festival observed throughout Ireland, Scotland,
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and the Isle of Man, Samhain marked the beginning of preparations for winter.
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Livestock were slaughtered in anticipation of the lean months,
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and ritual bonfires were lit in the belief that they could affect cleansing and confer protection.
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There is literary and archaeological evidence that in pre-Christian times,
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Samhain featured human sacrifice, a practice not uncommon among Celts and the
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tribes of Northern Europe.
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Julius Caesar describes a particularly gruesome form of Druidic sacrifice in
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his commentaries on the Gothic War.
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And this is a quote here, quote from Caesar.
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Others use figures of immense size whose limbs, woven out of twigs,
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they fill with living men and set on fire, and the men perish in a sheet of flame. Oh my God.
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The image was put to unforgettable use in the British horror film The Wicker Man.
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Celebrated between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice,
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Samhain was a liminal festival in which the fabric of reality grew thin,
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and the other world drew nearer to this world.
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The Celtic other world was both the paradisal realm of the fairies and also
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the land of the dead, and certainly perilous to humans.
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It was believed that on Samhain the faith theata, the magic fog that made the
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fairies, or elves, invisible to human eyes, lifted.
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On that night in Ireland, all the fairy hills are thrown wide open,
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and the fairies sworn forth, James Fraser writes in The Golden Bough.
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Any man who is bold enough may then peep into the open green hills and see the
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treasures hidden in them.
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Worse than that, the cave of Cruchon in Connoha,
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known as the Hell Gate of Ireland, is unbarred on Samhain Eve or Halloween,
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and a host of horrible fiends and goblins used to rush forth.
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During Samhain, people would propitiate whatever fairies and spirits might be
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abroad by leaving out food and drink at night in hopes of blessing for the coming winter.
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We're going to have to stop here and take a break, so stay with us. We'll be right back.
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Hi, this is Bob Johnson. You're listening to Being Catholic right here on Catholic Spirit Radio.
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And we're talking about Halloween and reading from an article,
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The Death of Halloween, by Justin Lee, one of the associate editors of First Things Magazine.
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And what he means by that is we're talking about a lot of the magic and the
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play and the inversion of norms and so forth that have been sort of commercialized
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and have gone out of Halloween.
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And a lot of the spirit that we have lost in some of the holidays that we celebrate,
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even in the church, I think, and this idea of diversity instead of coming together
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as a people and doing things as a people and having special celebrations in
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beliefs and things beyond this world.
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And this is some of the things I think Western civilization has lost in this
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sense of play and sense of humor and sense of not only fun,
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but a sense of something bigger than ourselves in this world and understanding
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that we have lots of need to get back.
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And we're talking about some of the things that people did in this holiday of
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Samhain and how when the church holidays of all souls and all saints,
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they were celebrated near that same time that Samhain used to be celebrated.
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Some of these things merged and they merged in what has come to become called Halloween.
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And it goes on here, it says, on that night, they built bonfires and so forth.
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And it says, the bonfires were used in divination, writes, as were certain nuts
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and apples thought to have a strong connection to the other world.
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Mummery, that is pantomime, and
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guising, that is costuming, became common practices from the 16th century.
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Youths, especially young men, would go from house to house, costumed as denizens
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of the other world, seeking payouts in exchange for blessings,
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a practice analogous to the souling and doling of halotide, and a precursor to trick-or-treating.
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Halloween in the British Isles was also characterized by a spirit of play,
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but unlike Samhain, it emphasized social inversion, unique to the Christian imagination.
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In country parishes, community leaders would designate a lord of misrule,
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who reigned from Halloween to Candlemas, to spearhead the mischief.
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Revelers would parade around town and solicit contributions to keep the party
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going. Neighbors who refused were mocked and harassed.
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The Puritan pamphleteer Philip Stubbs provides a colorful polemic against the
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revelers in the tract Anatomy of Abuses, 1583.
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The Lord of Misrule marched his
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heathen company towards the church and churchyard, their pipers piping,
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their drummers thundering, their stumps dancing, their bells jingling,
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their handkerchiefs swinging about their heads like madmen, their hobby horses
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and other monsters skirmishing amongst the rout.
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Fraser saw in this activity an extension of the ancient Roman tradition of crowning
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a mock king during Saturnalia, usually a slave who would be sacrificed at the festival's end.
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The Christian festival, of course, embraces the joys of social inversion while
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dispensing with ritual murder.
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Amidst the tomfoolery, the dead were honored.
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All Souls Day, writes the story of Nicholas Rogers in Halloween.
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Featured midnight vigils at grave sites, and until the 18th century,
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domestic offerings of food and clothing for the recently departed.
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As late as a century ago in Catholic Ireland, it was commonly believed that
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the dead would return on All Hallow Eve or on the day thereafter.
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In certain English towns, the ghosts of those who would die in the coming year
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were believed to appear.
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The denizens of Ferry and the land of the dead, memorably depicted in Charles
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Williams' novel All Hallows' Eve, experience time differently than we do.
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Key to understanding the sociological function of Halloween is the idea of the carnivalesque,
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famously explored by Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Botkin
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in books on Dostoevsky and Rabelais.
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Medieval carnivals were festivals that preceded important moments in the liturgical
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calendar, such as Lent, featured parades and raucous street parties,
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and gave a general license to mischief.
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More than that, carnival involved its own worldview and was in many ways a world unto itself.
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As Botkin explains, carnival is not contemplated and, strictly speaking, not even performed.
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Its participants live in it. They live by its laws, as long as those laws are in effect.
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As in all true play, the norms and laws of regular life are shelved.
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People who in life are separated by impenetrable hierarchical barriers enter
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in free familiar contract on the carnival square.
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Carnival is a great leveler, joining the sacred with the profane,
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the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid.
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In practices central to carnival, such as the mock crowning and subsequent decrowning
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of the Carnival King, the community embraces the pathos of shifts and changes, of death and renewal.
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Carnival was cathartic, an opportunity to vent the steam of conflict that naturally
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builds within communities.
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So it gave people a chance in the fact that, you know, to let off steam,
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to come together, you know,
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different peoples and be one and be a people and to do things together and have
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a sort of a magical ability to get rid of a lot of the animosities and so forth
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that they held during normal times.
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And if anything, we certainly need that again, don't we, man?
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Oh, it's an understatement.
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For sure. Sanctioned transgression of the normative order has always been a feature of Halloween.
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The practice of divination, for example, was tolerated as a traditional custom
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during Halloween, where at other times of the year it would have been prescribed,
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especially among Protestants.
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In other words, it was okay during Halloween to try and use a supernatural means
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of understanding the future or, you know, predicting things about the future.
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Bringing the dead to speak. Right.
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And, you know, that's something that would be forbidden. It's forbidden in the
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Catholic Church. It would certainly be forbidden by Protestants.
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But on Halloween, it was suspended.
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That norm was suspended, and you could do this. And it might have been a little
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bit of fun in the sense of, you know, this is something that's sort of we're
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play-acting at. But there's always that touch of reality to it,
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always that touch of maybe this is really happening.
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And it gives a flavor and a unity to people that they otherwise don't have.
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And it brings people together that are otherwise separated.
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In an act of politically imposed disenchantment, loyal authorities in England
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implemented changes to Halloween practices reflective of Protestants' hostility
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to Catholicism, especially the doctrine of purgatory.
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And there's still a lot of hostility to the doctrine of purgatory among Protestants,
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I think, even to this day. Oh, there is, yes.
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And I don't see why. I mean, it says in the Bible strictly that,
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you know, no unclean thing shall enter heaven.
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And the purgatory is the idea of cleansing.
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Edward VI banned bell ringing in 1548, and by 1515— He'd get along well and normal.
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Yeah, right. Yeah.
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Edward VI, again, I'll say this band bell ringing in 1548, and by 1559,
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during the reign of Elizabeth I, prayers for the dead were excised from the Anglican litany.
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I mean, this was, you know, the idea of praying for the dead is a good thing.
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Again, this reaches back and brings the dead back to speak for themselves,
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and, you know, what Chesterton called the democracy of the dead,
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and what the Catholic Church retains.
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The state church soon ceased celebrating Hallow Mass altogether,
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and in 1647 Parliament banned all festivals that smacked of Catholic influence.
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The ban lasted until the Stuart Restoration in 1660.
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There were Catholic holdouts, of course, who kept alive such practices as hilltop
29:05
bonfires on All Saints' Night.
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More pervasive than fire rituals was the pre-Reformation tradition of souling,
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which prefigured both trick-or-treating and jack-o'-lanterns.
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Supplicants walked about their towns carrying lanterns made from hollowed turnips,
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not pumpkins, but turnips.
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The candle, representing a soul in purgatory, and solicited soul cakes from
29:33
the neighbors in exchange for praying for the souls of their loved ones.
29:37
So that was sort of a precursor to trick-or-treating. You would go around and
29:43
you would ask for a soul cake and these were, what were they,
29:47
Linda soul cakes? They looked like donuts.
29:49
Yeah. Yeah. Little donuts.
29:53
Sign of eternity. In return, if you're receiving a soul cake to take with you
29:59
and to eat, you would then say a prayer for that person's dead relatives or
30:04
dead loved ones and so forth. There was a diddy they sang.
30:07
Was it a souling, a souling? The souling would come.
30:12
Yeah, I think. Go ahead. Something for Peter and Paul.
30:17
I can't remember. One for Peter, one for Paul, and one for him who made us all.
30:22
Right, there we got it. Right, it goes on.
30:27
And so they would sing that, and then they would get a soul cake,
30:30
and they would go on to the next person.
30:32
And that way, it would be reinforced by looking at the candle and the hollowed-out
30:38
turnip and so forth, that there actually was a soul in purgatory,
30:42
that people were praying for that soul in purgatory, and that the people on
30:47
earth giving out the soul cake were doing something for that person in purgatory.
30:52
And they were listening prayers. Right.
30:55
So, and so it was a good thing.
30:59
Through all hallows and all, though all hallows and all souls had lost much
31:04
of their Catholic religious character by the mid 17th century,
31:08
they preserved their distinction as a time of supernatural activity.
31:13
In Lancashire, candles and torches were wielded to repel witches and evil spirits.
31:20
The liminal, supernatural character of Haleltide survived the Reformation,
31:26
but the theological import of practices such as souling and doling was lost,
31:31
with dire consequences for the festival's play element.
31:37
And again, that's important, the sense of play, the sense of going out and doing
31:41
things in reverse of what ordinary days are.
31:46
By representing a soul in purgatory, a turnip lantern made purgatory real to the person carrying it.
31:53
The loss of theological reference meant that the festival was becoming less
31:59
a world unto itself and thus less animated by a spirit of play.
32:05
In Scotland, by contrast, Halloween retained its popularity.
32:10
Over the centuries, its celebration became an opportunity for preserving national character.
32:17
Catholic Ireland, likewise, preferred Halloween to Bonfire Night.
32:22
And, you know, Bonfire Night was a night, I think, on November 5th,
32:26
where they celebrated Guy Fawkes Day, I think.
32:29
And this was sort of like a celebration against the Catholicism and against the Pope.
32:34
Could be, yeah. And many of the latter's custom were transferred to the former,
32:40
that is, the customs of Guy Fox were transferred to Halloween,
32:45
reversing the direction of appropriation in England.
32:48
Because Reformation disenchantment held less sway in Scotland and Ireland,
32:53
space existed for the revival of certain older pagan customs.
32:58
Nicholas Rogers notes that in the Scottish Highlands, many of these customs
33:03
recalled the fire rituals of Samhain that were to be found in the first Celtic sagas.
33:10
So they're reaching back into the past and retaining things from some of the pagan rituals.
33:15
And all pagan things are not bad. There are a lot of pagan beliefs and so forth
33:19
and historical things that hold people together and that are good.
33:24
The link to Samhain was even stronger in Ireland.
33:28
Thanks to the preservation of Celtic oral traditions. The Catholic and pagan
33:32
traditions were in tension, but not mutually exclusive.
33:36
The wandering spirits associated with ancient Samhain and the wandering souls
33:41
of purgatory could be acknowledged at the same time, even by priests.
33:46
Such syncretism could also be observed in Scottish practice,
33:50
syncretism meaning bringing various aspects of different religions together
33:56
where they seem to coincide.
33:58
Though association with Samhain lingered, the connection of Halloween to All
34:03
Saints and All Souls Day grew attenuated.
34:06
By the 18th century, Halloween was more an occasion for courtship and merrymaking
34:13
than for solicitude for the baptized dead.
34:17
Nonetheless, Halloween courtship rituals exuded an irrepressible spirit of play.
34:25
Robert Burns preserves these rituals in his poem Halloween,
34:29
which depicts young people engaging in a variety of divination practices to
34:36
learn the identities and qualities of their future spouses and even their marriage's fates.
34:43
The rituals range from simple, saying a spell and looking into a mirror to scry
34:49
the face of your spouse, to elaborate,
34:52
hanging a wet shirt sleeve to dry near a fire and waiting until midnight when
34:59
an apparition of your lover would appear and turn the sleeve over to dry on the other side.
35:06
Some even involve consulting the devil.
35:10
The youths believe in the efficacy of these rituals, and they practice them
35:14
with delight and not a little fear.
35:17
For them, Halloween is a time out of time, a world unto itself,
35:22
possessing its own rules and ethos, permitting behaviors proscribed in ordinary life.
35:30
Again, that's this inversion where you can do things that ordinarily you couldn't do.
35:35
You can do them in a spirit of play, but at the same time with a touch of seriousness
35:41
and a touch of believing in the magical and a coming together of people as a people.
35:50
So we're going to stop here and take a break. So stay with us.
35:53
We'll be right back. You've been listening to Being Catholic with Bob Johnston
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Hi, this is Bob Johnston. You're listening to Being Catholic.
38:27
We're back from our break, and we're talking about Halloween,
38:31
and we're reading from an article in...
38:33
First Things Magazine, the November 2025 issue, The Death of Halloween by Justin
38:39
Lee, one of the associate editors.
38:41
And it's interesting, the whole history of Halloween and how a lot of it was
38:46
play and how it brought people together and how we've lost a lot of that.
38:49
It goes on here in the article. It says, because the Puritans despised Halloween
38:54
for its connection to Catholicism and its pagan spiritualism,
38:59
the holiday wasn't observed in North America until the mid-19th century when
39:04
it was introduced by Irish and Scottish immigrants.
39:07
Consequently, Halloween was
39:09
a marker of ethnic identity during the first decades of its observance.
39:14
The promotion of the holiday by ethnic organizations, such as the Caledonian
39:19
Society in Canada, emphasized its public rather than its familial character.
39:26
Masquerades and street festivities were celebrated, increasingly to the exclusion
39:31
of traditional fireside rituals.
39:34
Merchants were quick to seize on the consumer and commercial opportunities afforded
39:40
by the holiday, and one could buy Halloween masks in stores as early as 1874.
39:48
Grocers promoted the sale of a variety of nuts suited to traditional practices,
39:54
and by 1897, candy manufacturers were marketing to Halloween shoppers.
40:01
Commercialization no doubt hastened the death of traditional Halloween practices,
40:06
just as it had previously those of Christmas.
40:10
As early as 1876, the New York Times could moan the glory of this once popular festival has departed.
40:18
Its triumphs and rough jollities, festivals, and strange rites are a matter
40:24
of history and live only in the immortal verse of Burns and traditional lore.
40:29
While customs of home and hearth faded, other traditions were expanded, if also altered.
40:35
Halloween had always had its gendered expressions, with girls more interested
40:40
in romantic divination, and boys more apt to venture outdoors in costume and
40:46
roughhouse, and this distinction largely remained.
40:51
But in more densely populated cities, the opportunities for mischief-making
40:57
were endless, and pranking increasingly characterized the holiday.
41:03
As had been the case in the British Isles, authorities customarily looked the other way.
41:08
Pranking typically involved light vandalism, such as placing wagons on rooftops,
41:14
but could get as ambitious as the greasing of streetcar tracks.
41:19
In the early 20th century, college students became especially known for nefarious
41:25
activity on Halloween, belying the idea that misbehavior was the domain of the lower classes.
41:33
The Chicago Daily Tribune records a rather gruesome prank pulled by medical
41:38
students at the University of Michigan on Halloween of 1900,
41:43
when the attendant, whose office it is to open University Hall,
41:48
arrived to perform his duty, he was confronted by a hideous sight,
41:53
propped against the folding doors of the building, and facing outward stood
41:58
the headless corpse of a woman,
42:00
still swathed in the antiseptic bandages of the laboratory.
42:05
Because of its timing, early in the fall semester, Halloween provided an opportunity
42:10
for hazing freshmen, which included the common practice of marching downtown
42:15
in costume and rushing theaters.
42:19
I'm not sure exactly what that means, but I guess.
42:22
Going in with the costumes, I guess, and running around and scaring people.
42:28
I can't believe it wasn't until the 19th. Yeah. Isn't it?
42:32
That's interesting. It says, anyhow, local populations grew weary of these collegiate
42:38
shenanigans, and by the 1920s, university administrators put an end to the rushes.
42:45
When schools moved the start of classes to earlier in the fall,
42:49
Halloween ceased to be a rite of passage.
42:53
Throughout the 20th century, the carnival inversion with the most staying power
42:57
was the perceived license Halloween gave to destructive, often criminal, impulses.
43:03
The 1934 Chicago World's Fair concluded with a Halloween riot involving upwards
43:10
of 370,000 people, many in costume.
43:14
The Chicago Daily Tribune reported on November 2nd, as the evening wore on,
43:21
roistering groups began a mad hunt for souvenirs.
43:24
Signs were ripped off buildings and carried away.
43:27
Then, as the lack of adequate police protection was realized,
43:31
the souvenir hunters became vandals.
43:34
Soon, the general scene was one of wreckage.
43:37
Halloween riots could be considerably more violent and destructive,
43:41
and the 1930s and 40s saw everything from race riots to arson sprees.
43:46
The violence prompted efforts to tame the holiday.
43:50
In 1950, for example, Harry Truman unsuccessfully directed the Senate to repurpose
43:57
Halloween as a youth honor day.
43:59
Though youth honor day sounded irredeemably hokey,
44:02
it was just one part of a largely successful campaign across the United States
44:07
and Canada to redirect youthful energy into pro-social activities such as high
44:13
school Halloween dances and other efforts to distract young men from jackassery.
44:22
Trick-or-treating, which gained popularity in the 1950s, was especially useful
44:27
for defanging the holiday.
44:30
In earlier generations, door-to-door doling carried the threat of recriminatory
44:35
action if social obligations were unfulfilled.
44:38
But, explains Rogers, the new trick-or-treating sought to marginalize adolescent
44:44
pranking and to defuse the antagonism inherent in a festive tribute,
44:49
transforming the exchange into a right of consumption.
44:54
Candy manufacturers began advertising their products in connection with door-to-door
44:58
soliciting, and costumers promoted Halloween as an opportunity for conspicuous consumption.
45:05
Gone were the homemade costumes of the interwar years.
45:10
Beginning in the 1950s, children bought their masks and outfits from retailers.
45:15
Commercialization helped to infantilize Halloween by compromising its internal unity as play.
45:22
Not being ordinary life stands out
45:25
it stands outside the immediate satisfaction of
45:28
wants and appetites indeed it
45:31
interrupts the appetites process but when
45:34
commercial interests are imposed upon it play ceases to be a world unto itself
45:39
and is robbed of its generative power by the 1960s halloween had lost much of
45:46
its former anarchy and not a little of its charm the spirit of carnival was
45:51
replaced by spirits bought in liquor stores.
45:55
Less than a decade later, a new threat emerged.
45:59
In the 1960s, rumors of drug-tainted candy and razor blades in apples became commonplace.
46:05
The accounts of Halloween sadism were almost entirely baseless,
46:10
but they had a profound effect on the social imagination.
46:13
Even venerable news outlets fanned the flames of moral panic.
46:18
In 1970, for example, the New York State Health Commissioner warned New York
46:24
Times readers children should not eat any of the collected goodies until they
46:28
have been carefully examined by an adult.
46:31
In recent years, pins, razor blades, slivers of glass, and poison have appeared
46:36
in the treats gathered by children across New York State.
46:40
The claim was simply false.
46:43
The 1970s also saw the re-emergence of Halloween rioting and large-scale destruction
46:49
of property and urban centers.
46:51
Detroit experienced the worst of it, with young men setting fires to abandoned
46:56
houses of which the city had plenty.
46:58
The arson reached its peak in 1983, when nearly a thousand fires were set during
47:04
the three days surrounding Devil's Night.
47:07
As play ceases to be play, and as transgression is normalized across society,
47:13
it would seem that carnival-esque transgression must be intensified to deliver a kick.
47:19
Trick or treating survived the chaos of inner-city violence and threats of Halloween
47:25
sadism, though its popularity waned considerably in the 1980s.
47:30
Compared to its practice in the 50s, when thick homogeneous communities meant
47:34
that Children could roam without supervision.
47:38
It was much diminished, hemmed in by parental vigilance. And as Halloween was
47:45
further hollowed out by social decay, consumerism continued to fill the vacuum.
47:51
Last year, Americans spent $11.6 billion on the holiday, $700 million,
47:58
which was for pet costumes. Oh, my God.
48:02
Oh, man.
48:07
Halloween's transformation since the late 19th century exemplify the fate of
48:12
institutions under liquid modernity.
48:15
Zygmunt Bauman's turn for the growing conviction that change is the only permanence,
48:20
and uncertainty the only certainty.
48:22
And that's one of the things about our modern society, this idea that everything
48:26
has to constantly change. This idea of liberalism is there's no break on anything.
48:32
As soon as something is a norm, liberalism has to attack that norm and change
48:36
that norm. It can't turn it upside down in fun.
48:39
An inversion in fun is what Halloween originally did, and things,
48:44
you know, Christmas even, and special seasons and so forth.
48:49
Instead, it has to absolutely attack it, turn it over, and create something
48:54
new, and then that becomes a norm, and then it's on to something else.
48:57
And then everything eventually becomes simply a war between one group and another
49:02
without any of the fun involved and without a sense of humor.
49:07
We can apply this observation to Halloween by means of an analogy.
49:11
Some of the physical buildings that make up Harvard University are quite old,
49:16
but the people, courses, ideologies, and identities that inhabit them change
49:21
with increasing frequency.
49:23
Much of the old form is still in place, but its content is in radical flux.
49:29
A similar thing has happened over time with Halloween. The forms or tropes of
49:34
Halloween have been emptied of their traditional content by the process of secularization
49:40
and commercialization.
49:42
Costumes no longer gesture to genuine belief in fairies or spirits.
49:46
The practices of souling and doling, now trick-or-treating, no longer bear any
49:52
connection to belief in the afterlife or to veneration of lost loved ones or
49:57
even to norms of mutuality.
50:00
Jack-o'-lanterns no longer call to mind the souls wandering in purgatory,
50:04
but refer only to themselves.
50:06
Romantic games remain, but no longer have marriage in view.
50:10
For most people, Halloween is neither a reminder of the claims the dead have
50:15
on the living, nor an anticipation of new life, futurity.
50:20
We are left with only the eternal now of the market.
50:25
The lingering customs and artifacts have been stripped of their reference.
50:28
They are vacuums waiting to be filled and emptied and filled again until we
50:34
abandon them out of sheer boredom.
50:37
If Halloween is to mean anything more than boozing and philandering,
50:42
it will do so only in smaller contexts where communities both acknowledge their
50:48
normative orders and sanction inversions of those orders.
50:52
The carnivalence might still be possible in places like Mormon Utah,
50:57
which have done comparatively well at preserving traditional cultural norms,
51:01
but even there the poorest interconnected nature of
51:05
our world threatens to rob social inversion of
51:08
its catharsis carnival less play may
51:11
be irretrievable for our time it makes you wonder why if this is why politics
51:18
and so forth have become so vicious because we've lost our sense of humor and
51:22
lost our sense of play it was the victory of laughter over fear that most impressed the medieval man.
51:29
That victory reaches its zenith in Christian culture.
51:32
Faith in Christ allows us to truly laugh in the face of death.
51:37
Where, O death, is thy victory? Where, O Hades, is thy sting?
51:41
That comes in 1 Corinthians.
51:44
Others may laugh at death mockingly, nervously, nihilistically,
51:48
but theirs is at bottom a laugh of despair.
51:52
The Christian laugh is in joy. When Christ was resurrected, surely the first
51:58
sound to issue from his lips was a joyous laugh.
52:01
If Halloween is to retain any value for Christians, we must learn to play,
52:06
and we must learn to laugh again in the laughter of Christ.
52:11
And I think, Len, don't you, that sums it up.
52:15
It seems to me that progressives especially,
52:18
are so sick and tired with the goody-goodiness that progressiveness and liberalist
52:26
demands that they have come to finally demand a scapegoat.
52:33
In order to vent their rage at not being able to actually let down and play and let down and laugh.
52:42
We have to be serious adults all the time.
52:46
All the time, and so this leads to this constant inventing of a scapegoat,
52:50
and conservatives or MAGA or whatever has become the scapegoat,
52:55
and maybe it's vice versa to a certain extent too,
52:57
and then there's this division and war, And I think it's very dangerous for
53:02
society to have lost its sense of play and its sense of carnival and its sense
53:08
of the supernatural and its sense of magic.
53:11
And unless we regain it, and I think the Catholic Church, especially by retaining
53:16
a lot of its history and a lot of its tradition, and it's traditionless,
53:20
and we'll get to that maybe in the next show,
53:23
that bring that back, that give society a sense of resilience that can help
53:29
make it through a lot of the crises that societies have.
53:34
Yeah, I thought it was very interesting having both of us growing up during
53:40
the 50s and into the 60s somewhat.
53:46
But in the 50s, we could go trick-or-treating at very young ages all by ourselves.
53:52
Yes, we could. The neighborhood kids would all go together. There were no adults involved. No.
53:58
And, you know, went all over town. You know, granted, we only lived in a community
54:04
of 5,000 people, but still, I mean, today you can't let your kids out of your sight.
54:12
Adults were adults in those days. I mean, adults pretty much stayed out of kids'
54:16
lives, and kids stayed out of adult lives.
54:18
Yeah. I mean, they didn't interfere with each other. Right.
54:24
The adults, oh, I can remember going to—,
54:27
Was it Mrs. Sweet? No, it wasn't Mrs. Sweet. One of the ladies made popcorn balls. Huge.
54:35
Homemade popcorn balls. Yeah, there were still a lot of homemade treats back then.
54:40
And, well, that ended when they thought everybody's being poisoned. Yeah.
54:46
But I can remember going there and then, you know, the adults made a lot of
54:52
the treats. Yeah, they did.
54:55
Wrap it up in wax paper.
54:58
Well, at any rate, we'll say our prayer. St. Michael, the archangel, defend us in battle.
55:05
Be our protection against the wickedness and scenarios of the devil.
55:08
May God rebuke and humbly pray.
55:12
And do thou, Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the power of God,
55:16
thrust into hell, Satan, and all evil spirits who wander through the world through their own souls.
55:23
Amen. You've been listening to Being Catholic with Bob Johnston.
55:27
On Catholic Spirit Radio, if you'd like to contact Bob, email bob at catholicspiritradio.com.
55:34
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