Y Safle

The BBC reports:

More than 300 registered Pagans are in Britain’s prisons Pagan prisoners in Britain are to be given time off work duties to allow them to observe a religious festival on the day of Halloween. Pagans observe the Celtic New Year’s Eve on 31 October, which they see as Britain’s indigenous New Year event.

Now, notwithstanding that they have the wrong day, and what they are actually celebrating is either the night before All Hallows, or perhaps the night before the Roman Pomona festival, there is another major flaw with this woolly headed notion of religious inclusivity.

You see, Pagan Celts (that is Celt pronounced Kelt, for American readers), had a very specific practice on the autumnal fire festival (Samhain in Irish - pronounced something like Sow-[h]in).

According to T D Kendrick’s excellent book “The Druids”, the practice of human sacrifice amongst the Celts probably arose with a need to dispense with prisoners that were a danger to the society and which the community could not support in a prison community. Thus the Celts kept no such prisoners. They sacrificed them.

And they did this, according to the (mostly Roman) sources that are extant, by constructing wickerwork cages or effigies within which the prisoners were caged and then the wickerwork was set alight as a Samhain sacrifice.

So those 300 pagan prisoners who are demanding that their religion be recognised within the prison service should get more than they bargained for tonight, if they really are celebrating the old pagan festivals.