Blame the Irish? The following is from a priest outside the United States.
Dear Father Joseph,
I am concerned that the Orthodox … are offering falsehoods on their websites. We are called to the disciples of truth and not to spread misinformation.
There was no deity called Samhain who was the Lord of Death and needed appeasing.
Yes, let us take up arms against the resurgence of paganism but not by equipping our people with false “truths”. We are doing them a disservice by offering them weapons of untruth and we are making ourselves look foolish and ignorant in front of the neo-pagans.
Samhain is simply Irish Gaelic for the end period of the year which more or less covers our modern month of November, the season of the end of the harvest.
The myth of a god called Samhain first appears among the English, in the year 1770 when Col. Charles Vallency wrote a 6 volume set of books which attempted to prove that the Irish people came from Armenia!
Geoffrey Higgins then promoted this error of a supposed god called Samhain in a book in 1827 when he attempted to prove that the Druids originally came from India.
The error might have originated in confusion over the name of Samana, an ancient Vedic/Hindu deity. I have located a website which may not be everyone’s favourite but it will provide a resource if anybody has the interest in dealing with this modern myth of a god named Samhain.
H E R E.
On reflection I think that what irritates me is that the modern abomination of Halloween is an American creation, but the blasphemy of it all is being unfairly laid upon my Irish ancestors!
In pre-Christian Ireland the festival of Samhain was nothing as wicked as what occurs with the modern America celebration of this day.
In Ireland it provided the occasion for the great weeklong Feis (Parliament) at Tara where all the kings and druidic scholars (olamhs) gathered to revise the laws and make new laws and to oversee the writing of another chapter into the Annals of Ireland.
Admittedly there were animal sacrifices at this time, but they were no worse than the animal sacrifices being offered in Jerusalem during this same pre-christian period.
There was no cowering at home in the dark, afraid of ghosts and ghoulies. Instead there were great bonfire (bone-fires) in all the villages which people lit to dispose of the bones and carcases of the animals they had killed and salted away to provide their food for the coming winter. There was celebrations and happiness around these bone-fires as they celebrated the end of all the hard work of summer and autumn.
The Irish (whose ability to create mythology is irrepressible) believed that the High King Ollamh Fodla who started these Samhain gatherings was none other than the great Psalmist King David come from Israel. Of course they also believe that the Prophet Jeremiah ended his days in Ireland, together with his daughters, and they can show you his grave today at Loughcrew, as well as Jacob’s Pillow, the Stone of Destiny, which Jeremiah brought to Ireland!
And did I mention the Ark of the Covenant which every Irish child knows rests under the ruined chapel on the hill of Cashel? 🙂
Sigh. I’ve flipped and flopped over the years regarding this “holiday;” as once reported, I’m a halloween hypocrite.
Clocks here run on Byzantine time, which starts at sunset. Dates are calculated according to the Julian calendar of the Roman Empire, which varies by 13 days from the modern Gregorian calendar you’re used to. Some settlements are supplied solely by mule teams, and the flags of Byzantium still fly.
