The evident decline in the social resonance of Christian holidays of Saints and All Saints corresponds, in Italy as in the rest of the Western world, to the triumphant affirmation of Halloween, now a custom and much more heartfelt than those of religious tradition.
The living and the dead
Its origins are ancient, dating back to pre-Christian Ireland. It was celebrated on October 31st, which in the Celtic calendar marked the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter. This festival, known as Samhain, already represented a true New Year’s Eve for the people of the British Isles two millennia ago. From there, in the mid-19th century, with the wave of immigration to the United States, it was brought overseas, where it became widespread.
According to original belief, on this day the earthly world and the afterlife could meet. The spirits of the dead returned to the world of the living, and they had to be confronted somehow, as they weren’t always friendly. The oldest seasonal celebration, tied to the rhythms of nature, was grafted onto the Irish legend of the evil blacksmith Jack. After promising his soul to the devil, he repeatedly deceived him, so that upon his death, not even hell would welcome him, and he was condemned to wander in eternal darkness, illuminated only by the dim light of a candle kept inside a hollowed-out turnip.
Legend has it that on Halloween night, Jack, along with other spirits, wanders in search of refuge. At the root of what has now become a festive custom lies this problematic vision of the relationship between the living and the dead. The frightening masks, decorations featuring bats, skeletons, and other macabre symbols represent the modern evolution of ancient rituals intended to confuse the spirits believed to roam the earth on the night of October 31st.
The very ritual formula ” trick or treat ,” which children repeat as they go from house to house, asking for sweets as gifts, actually conceals the original idea of a threat, which corresponds to a negotiation to avoid unpleasant pranks. The alternative posed is in fact between trick , which means “fraud ,” “ mischief , ” “ a bad prank,” and treat , which is instead a gift. And the pumpkin lanterns outside the house, which over time have replaced turnips, in their proper meaning serve to exorcise the potential threat of the dead.
An alternative reading of Halloween
One cannot help but compare this message with that of Christian holidays, saints, and the deceased, perceived as protectors and friends, and indeed, in some cultural contexts—especially in the South—as bringers of gifts. It’s clear that we’re faced with two very different ways of conceiving death, where the defining feature is the Christian conception, which sees it as a purification leading to fulfillment, rather than a fall into a shadow world where there is no redemption.
The Catholic Church’s resistance to the spread of a holiday alien to our cultural and spiritual tradition, imported from the United States in the wake of a powerful consumerist impulse, is understandable. Pope Francis spoke of a “negative culture of death and the dead.”
Some, however, emphasize that this celebration’s meaning is essentially the same as that of Christian solemnities: exorcising death and the terror it has always instilled in the human heart. Only the path to achieving this goal is different, they say. To the gloomy vision that devalues the earthly world by exalting the afterlife, Halloween paganly counters with a playful perspective, in which death is defeated by an essentially parodic representation, which lightens the experience of death by applying a healthy dose of irony.
“There are those who, on the night of October 31st, light a candle inside a pumpkin to laugh at fear, and there are those who, on the same night, light a candle in front of an altar to be afraid of laughing. Guess who’s having more fun,” writes Alessandro Giacomini in “Il Dolomiti.” “Halloween is the night when people laugh at death, exorcise the unknown, mock evil with irony, everything that religious power, for centuries, has used to keep people subjugated: fear, darkness, sin.”
In this reading, Halloween becomes the symbol of a society that has learned to live with the finiteness of life without having to reckon with death, and even laugh about it. This interpretation should be taken seriously, as it allows us to understand the success of this holiday far better than any historical-philological reconstruction.
This corresponds to the removal of death that is recorded in our societies, compared to those of the past, in which it played a significant role in the experience of the living.
In the past, the dying person would gather around them their family, and their passing implied the passing on of a legacy, a message to be treasured in memory. Today, people die in hospitals or hospices, and if the event occurs at home, children are sent to a friendly family so they don’t have to witness it. And the story of those who came before them no longer carries any weight in an age that has seen the “death of the father” as a radical departure from his example and teachings.
The fact is that our society has lost “a symbolic horizon capable of making dying ‘socially experienced’ and which allows us to speak about death and, at the same time, to speak with the dying”; there are no longer ” words capable of making dying socially experienced.” The will to dominate that characterizes technological society takes over: “Death in hospital (…) ends up being a bureaucratized death, where dying dissolves into a socio-organizational context in which the functional replaces the human. And at the same time, a technicized death, where dying tends to be increasingly programmed and planned” (Viafora).
This social phenomenon is accompanied by a cultural one that tends to valorize finitude as such, eliminating the reference to a “beyond” that it logically presupposes. Unlike in the modern age, where the subject tended to become absolute and replace God (in certain philosophies, “I” was written with a capital “I”), today we recognize ourselves as relative, but without this implying reference to an Absolute. God has become superfluous, and with Him also the idea of an eternal destiny lived in communion with Him and separate from Him. Who speaks of heaven and hell anymore?
Censorship on death
Is it any wonder that even the relationship with the dead has gradually weakened to the point, in many cases—especially among young people—of disappearing altogether? Of course, on November 2nd, many will still go to the cemetery to bring a bouquet of flowers. The rituals will continue for some time to attest to a connection, but the collective perception is moving in the opposite direction.
And even in our personal lives, the thought of death is now censored. It resurfaces especially during tragic events—accidents, premature deaths from disease—which suddenly reveal its silent proximity. But everything in our society—with its frenetic pace, its satiating and dizzying consumerism, its mirages of success—is designed to make us forget it. Yet we no longer have the time to think about it!
Hence Halloween. Those who see this holiday as a radical alternative to the Christian vision are ultimately right. The mistake, if anything, is to talk about it as an antidote to fear. There is no fear in the face of death, because it is not a final event that concludes existence, but the horizon within which it unfolds, drawing from it a sense of its finiteness. Existentialist philosophers have spoken of “anguish,” which is rather the awareness of this horizon. And that this awareness constitutes an important element of the human experience is attested by all philosophies and all forms of art (I am thinking here, to cite just one recent example, of Ingmar Bergman’s beautiful film “The Seventh Seal”).
Perhaps it is from the dialogue with death and the perception of nothingness that life itself draws its richness and joy, of which the constant source is wonder and gratitude at the experience of being. And we might wonder if it isn’t precisely the exorcism of the question of death—even by transforming All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day into yet another consumerist event—that has fostered the nihilism denounced by Galimberti that empties our existence today.
Because, as Pope Francis said, precisely regarding Halloween, “forgetting death is also its beginning; whoever forgets death has already begun to die.”
