Tea at Trianon: All Hallows Eve is Not Pagan

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, October 30, 2008

All Hallows Eve is Not Pagan

It is Catholic. I have never run into so many Puritans in my life as I have in some recent Halloween debates. I went trick-or-treating all throughout my childhood and I have NEVER, not once, felt tempted to dabble in witchcraft. Not once. It was always fun to dress up and be creative with costumes. The best costume I ever had was when I went to a Halloween pageant as Empress Josephine, in sixth grade. In some ways, in our country, Halloween is the American version of the fancy dress ball. It has some pagan elements but then so does Christmas. Christmas trees come from the Druids.

The Catholic religion has always skillfully united devotion and feast days with wholesome merry-making, something which many Protestant sects are unable to do. Our ancestors were pagan and the Church incorporated many of their customs into our celebration of holidays. If you want to strip every Christian holiday of every single vestige of paganism, then just become a Puritan, and be done with it. There are many genuinely evil and scary things from which our children need to be protected, but dressing up at Halloween is not one of them. Share