There is a lot of poor research on the net concerning the meaning and origins of Halloween. When I was an Anglican priest I researched this topic and came to many of the same conclusions that John Sanidopoulos of the Orthodox blog Mystagogy has come to. I think you will find his post “Orthodoxy and Halloween” to be very informative and probably very different than anything you have read on the subject before.The following quotations from John’s post hopefully will wet your appetite to read his informative post.
“This smear campaign against Halloween, in which it has been scapegoated among Christians as the ultimate manifestation of secularism and satanism in contemporary culture, only goes back to farely recent modern times when certain Christian groups resorted to any fanciful tale to counter the emerging counter-culture of the 60′s and 70′s that was corrupting the youth. Christian leaders since then have clutched us in a guilt trip ever since about a holiday which prior to this extreme reaction was indeed harmless for the most part like any other holiday and had no connection with satanic rituals. It was a cultural festival which, though mischievous at times, really posed no threat to society until we were forced to believe that it did.
The fact is that I also once opposed Halloween for religious reasons, being convinced by fundamentalist literature that it was the “devil’s holiday”, a conspiracy of Neopagans and Satanists to corrupt our youth. Later when I researched the background of the holiday I came to different conclusions. I realized in the impurity and evil of my egotistical heart I was choosing a much easier enemy to fight rather than the much more difficult enemy within, the enemy of my ego which easily saw scandal elsewhere rather than in the impurity and scandal within my own heart and mind.…..
“There’s zero evidence that the ancient Druids or their congregants ever dressed in identity-hiding costumes or engaged in ritualized begging at harvest time. The connections between these Druid practices and modern Halloween are based on early Roman sources and modern fundamentalist propaganda.”
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