It wasn’t a pagan feast” “

Two popular festivities are annually celebrated, the one hard on the heels of the other, during these early days of November in Great Britain: Halloween and Guy Fawkes. The first is typically American, the second more traditionally British. Halloween is celebrated on 1st November, Guy Fawkes Day on 5 November. Both have by now become part of folklore, yet the two festivities are very different in origin and culture. We’ve tried to discover their roots. A pagan feast? Halloween is not a festivity with a very long tradition in Great Britain, the European country culturally closest to the United States. Imported only after the second world war, today Halloween has become an essential event for children who, dressed as monsters, go from house to house to collect sweets and small donations of money, reciting the famous “Trick or treat?”. The most common doubt among parents and educators concerns the pagan origins of the feast. The British Pagan Federation maintains that the feast of Halloween can be traced back to the Celtic celebration of Samhain, or “Sow in”, which marked the end of summer and the beginning of winter. This is an origin that gives rise to a certain disquiet among evangelicals of the Church of England, the more traditionalist Anglicans. “The Catholic Church has never pronounced on the celebration of Halloween'”, explains Tom Horwood of the Catholic Media Office. “The attempt of the British Pagan Federation to appropriate this festivity leaves us in some doubt. There exists a perfectly good religious origin of Halloween which in Ireland, in past centuries, was a Christian feast, as attested by the name itself: ‘Halloween’ is in fact a modern version of ‘All Hallows Day’, i.e. All Saints”. A useful festivity? Whatever the pros and cons of the “feast of monsters”, according to the commentators of the more important British dailies, “this festivity helps children to come to terms with the unknown and frightening world of dreams”. According to a BBC programme on Halloween, it plays the role of a “game therapy that helps to give balance to a developing personality. For adults it’s an occasion on which the social conventions are relaxed a bit. Even grown-ups can put on fancy dress and so become children again”. A useful festivity? Guy Fawkes Day, a British festivity. The celebration of Guy Fawkes Day is essentially British. It takes its name from the Catholic conspirator who, on 4 November 1605, tried to blow up the parliament at Westminster and to kill king James I, who had succeeded the Protestant Elizabeth I, daughter of Henry VIII, the sovereign who had detached England from Rome and founded the Church of England in 1532. The failed attempt, the re-establishment of order and the transformation of Great Britain into a Protestant country have ever since been commemorated by bonfires, fireworks and the burning of effigies representing the conspirator Guy Fawkes throughout the country. Over the centuries the strong anti-Catholic connotation of the festivity has gradually weakened. Today Guy Fawkes Day symbolises for Protestants the failure of a Catholic conspiracy, for anarchists it’s a way of protesting against the government and for the overwhelming majority of the British people it’s an occasion to celebrate in preparation for the rigours of winter. Effigies with the features of Margaret Thatcher, Jacques Chirac, Saddam Hussein and Tony Blair have in the past been burnt. In the town of Lewes, East Sussex, each year the members of the Cliffe Bonfire Society burn an effigy of Pope Pius V, who excommunicated Elizabeth I in 1570. The circumstance aroused the reaction of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, archbishop of Westminster and Catholic Primate of England and Wales. In reply the members of the Cliffe Bonfire Society decided to dedicate an effigy to him too and to burn it. The hope is, comments the current bishop of the diocese of Brighton and Arundel, Kieran Conry, that “this year, also in view of the tragic events of 11 September, everyone may show greater appreciation for religious tolerance”. Silvia Guzzetti – London