Thursday, October 31, 2013

Halloween in Tudor England

 Nancy Bilyeau discusses the genius of the Church in baptizing pagan customs so that they became part of the celebrations of the high and holy Christian feast days. The Reformation tried to purify the Faith of any "pagan" superstitions, which resulted in a great deal of destruction.  Of course, black magic was always forbidden to Christians by the Church and in most places, witchcraft was a capital offense. To quote:
Nothing shows the merger of Celtic and Christian beliefs better than "soul cakes." These small, round cakes, filled with nutmeg or cinnamon or currants, were made for All Saints’ Day on November 1st. The cakes were offered as a way to say prayers for the departed (you can picture the village priest nodding in approval) but they were also given away to protect people on the day of the year that the wall was thinnest between the living and the dead, a Celtic if not Druid belief. I am fascinated by soul cakes, and I worked them into my first novel, The Crown, a thriller set in 1537-1538 England. Soul cakes even end up being a clue!

In the early 16th century, Halloween on October 31st, All Saints’ Day (or All Hallows Day) on November 1st and All Souls’ Day on November 2nd were a complex grouping of traditions and observances. Life revolved around the regular worship, the holidays and the feast days that constituted the liturgy. As the great Eamon Duffy wrote: "For within that great seasonal cycle of fast and festival, of ritual observance and symbolic gesture, lay Christians found the paradigms and the stories which shaped their perception of the world and their place in it." (Read more.)
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