Y Safle

When I stated, as I have done on this forum, that:

The Samhain festival, whilst lost in history, clearly has a bearing on the modern celebration of Guy Fawkes night (AKA bonfire night) in the UK. The lighting of Samhain bonfires was clearly a celtic practice and one that is seen still all over europe in various guises.

I drew this objection:

“How do you figure that Stephen? Guy Fawkes is a gunpowder plot having to do with treason. It is celebrated on Nov 5 because on this date in 1605 a group of Roman Catholics tried to blow up the houses of Parliament with the government, King James 1, his Queen and their son. It is a day of Thanksgiving because this plot was foiled … “

The question we might ask then is why do we not celebrate the Rathbone plot with bonfires?

The answer is that the pagan practise of lighting bonfires at the start of November had survived (as it has also survived elsewhere in europe) from ancient times, and the state decided to “christianise” the practise by celebrating the foiling of the Gunpowder plot which happened to coincide with the more ancient bonfire night (more closely than one might suspect perhaps).

Of course, you rarely hear of Christians suggesting we not celebrate Guy Fawkes night in the UK simply because it has pagan origins - instead people concentrate on the celebration instead (fireworks, bonfires, candy floss and such like). This is in marked contrast to the Halloween celebration, which has become soe embroiled with occultism and every kind of foolishness, that many Christians feel they have no choice but to oppose it.

My correspondent continued:

“Childrens rhyme goes ..Remember, remember, the fifth of November, gunpowder, treason and plot. “

In fact, the more ancient rendering goes:

Please to remember the fifth of November Gunpowder, treason and plot. I see no reason why gunpowder, treason Should ever be forgot...

The “please to” is considered antiquated and is thus altered to “remember remember…” in the more modern rendition.

This correspondent continued:

‘”We see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot!” Sure there are bonfires. I was raised in Australia and we celebrated Guy Fawkes night .. I knew it was gunpowder and treason from the time I was a young child. We had no candy or going door to door and no hidden meanings ‘

But, of course, the burning of the “guy” does have a very ancient and hidden meaning. The difference is that (unlike halloween) the hidden meaning is forgotten.

Our information about Celtic practices, largely second hand accounts from Roman documents, is incomplete and it is hard to arrive at definite conclusions, but it seems that at least some Celtic tribes would burn prisoners in wickerwork cages on their bonfire nights, and that others may have burned wickerwork “green men” in a mock sacrifice associated with fertility or somesuch. The burning of a guy on bonfire night surely derives from tis practice, rather than the gunpowder plot.

None of the Gunpowder plot conspirators were burned to death. Their sentences were, in fact, rather gruesome but ended with them being hanged, drawn and quartered.

We don’t re-enact the execution of Guy Fawkes - we re-enact something far older.

“.. the bonfire was it and I knew why. No occult type hidden meaning there, just patriotism if you will. “

Well there is the celebration of the preservation of liberty and democracy, that is true, and I do not suggest we ban bonfire night, but we should note that the origin of the festival is as old as Samhain.

“Every church does not have an “all hallows festival” and the world surely isn’t out there following something that has to do with Church … “

Like Christmas you mean?

The origins of the “Christmas” date are just as convoluted as the origins of the “All saints day” date. (Christmas coincides with the Roman Saturnalia date, just as All Hallows coincides with Pomona).

“Witches are following the powers of darkness who are the real orchestraters of this day and the significance of this date. “

I have no doubt that the powers of darkness have used Samhain, as they have used any other means, to obstruct the work of the kingdom of God, but we might note that the date has a much more mundane origin.

The Celts were farmers as well as hunters. They lived in settlements and grew crops, and their two most important festivals mark the two most important times of the farming year - completion of sowing, when herds were taken to summer pasture, and the time after the completion of harvest, when herds were brought down to winter pasture.

Beltain takes place in May, when crops have been sown and begin to grow and the herds are taken to summer pasture. Samhain takes place at the end of the harvest and start of Winter, and marks the end of the year.

Indeed, the celebration of completion of harvest has a similarity with the Jewish festival of Pentecost. Both festivals concern crops and harvest and were originally devoid of any other beliefs. Pentecost gives thanksgiving to God, but Samhain arose amongst a people who did not know God. The spiritual void in their lives caused them to give thanks to their own gods for the completion of harvest in the Samhain festival.

Perhaps we ought to emphasise this aspect of Samhain and suggest that we treat Halloween like a harvest festival. We can draw out how the pagan celts had a need for God (and indeed embraced Christianity long before Augustine was even born) and how the festival shows their need for God.

We could celebrate the day with parties envolving apple bobbing and other games that involve fruits of the harvest, and in those countries that involve in the obnoxious habit of trick or treating you could play along with the practise on the basis that you are “sharing the fruit of the harvest”.

We can point out that witches costumes and the like are a modern day accretion to this festival, and we might discourage such occult overtones, but we need not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Kids will celebrate halloween, whatever we do. The question is, what will you do to make the celebration a positive experience as opposed to a negative one?

As we approach the end of October, and more and more shops are trying to sell us sweets to hand out to strange children as part of some American end of October custom called “trick or treat”, children are deciding what grisly thing they will dress up as for their halloween party.

Halloween is the eve of All Saints day - celebrated since the ninth century, and much of the superstition surrounding the day developed from superstitions surrounding this date. But the date was not idly chosen. Like many Christian festivals, the date was chosen because of related pagan festivals at or about the same time.

Now which pagan festival was originally on the night before November 1st? Many people will tell you this is Samhain or the Celtic New Year - one of the Celtic fire festivals.

I disagree.

I don’t think the historical Samhain is the 1st November, which would be an illogical choice adapted only to suit the Roman system of counting of the months.

Before I go on, I make the point that November 1st may now be celebrated as the Celtic New Year, in much the same way that April 6th is celebrated as the start of the fiscal year. Not because April 6th is special, but because the start of the year has become disconnected with the reasons for it.

I make this point, because it makes no difference on what day we celebrate such things - but when people make spurious special claims for a certain night of the year as being somehow distinct from other nights, based on Celtic history - then it is worth noting that the night they celebrate is not the night the ancient Celts probably celebrated.

My argument is that prior to the spread of Roman culture throughout the Celtic world, and the Roman calendar with it, the more likely date for Samhain would have been the day that we now call November 5th (although 6th November is also a candidate).

There is good evidence that the Celts of northern Europe kept an accounting of the passing of time by use of standing stones and such like, so whilst we do not need to delve into too much fantasy over how good astronomers they were, there is clear evidence that they would have known the dates of key events such as the solstices and equinoxes. We also know that they held the Beltain and Samhain festivals as especially significant, but prior to the Roman accounting of time there would be no way that we could get an exact record of the date of these festivals except by the astronomical method and counting.

Now consider the calendars I have reproduced below. The Autumnal equinox on 21st September, and winter solistice on 21st December are two well known significant astronomical dates. Recent evidence suggests that the winter solstice in particular was celebrated at Stone Henge (not the summer solstice, as many suppose).

Whilst Stone Henge pre-existed the Celts in Britain, we know that the current arrangement of the stones was carried out by the pre-Roman Celts. Thus it is important information that these Celts held 21st December to be a key date.

In the calendar below I have marked 45 dates starting on the autumnal equinox in orange. I have marked in green the 45 days prior to the winter solstice. Notice that leaves one day unmarked between the two dates - November 5th.

This date, equidistant between equinox and solstice, is - I suggest - the date on which pre-Romanised Celts would celebrate their fire festival, and begin their year. This would be the historical date of Samhain.

Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
                1  2
 3  4  5  6  7  8  9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
 1  2  3  4  5  6  7
 8  9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30 31

Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
          1  2  3  4
 5  6  7  8  9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30

Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
                1  2
 3  4  5  6  7  8  9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
31

The Romans had their own festival on November 1st - the feast of Pomona, the goddess of the autumnal harvest and orchards. This festival may have been sufficiently similar to Samhain that the two became conjoined on 1st November in the Roman calendar (a calendar which, in any case, knew considerable drift over time, so that 1st November at this point might conceivably have coincided with the observed and derived date for Samhain).

Sir James Frazer notes that every European fire festival other than the Celtic fire festivals was linked to a significant astronomical date, and it is he who (in chapter 62 of the Golden Bough) suggests that the Celtic dates are more siginificant to the herdsman, although he credits another with the revelation.

It seems that Frazer was not aware of the significance of the date of November 5th though, and his survey of customs that were still extant puts most of them on the night of 31st October. That does not, however, mean that throughout history the date was always 31st October, but only that this has become the significant date in modern consciousness, and that - I suggest - is owing to the feast of Pomona, and the spread of Roman culture.

We note that this could also explain the date of Christmas being 25th December - this being also the date of the Roman Saturnalia feast, which again may have drifted from a solstice date on 21st December pnce the Romans introduced their calendar.

Someone may object that we have a Celtic calendar - the Coligny calendar from 1st Century Gaul. Their year was shorter than ours, and they used intercalary days and months on a regular basis to maintain a balance between the lunar and solar year.

Festival days drifted during the course of a calendrical cycle, and could vary as much as month earlier or later in relation to where they fell during the first year of the cycle.

What we don’t know is whether this calendar with its festival drift was representative of an earlier Celtic tradition, or something that arose only after the Roman influence caused these Gauls to start accounting time with a calendar.

If we suppose that the Coligny calendar is representative of original Celtic tradition then the dates of these festivals would drift. Further it would suggest that a full moon was indeed chosen to recognise the date of Samhain.

If this is so then my thesis that November 1st is not Samhain, but the nearest Roman festival to Samhain would remain, but my thesis that the correct night is November 5th would be wrong - it would rather be a full moon close to 5th November (perhaps the first full moon thereafter). We cannot know for sure - and I think that is a good thing.

Whilst the calendar is not itself in any respect Roman, it is certainly quite possible that the whole concept of a calendar (and thus intercalary months) was derived from the Roman practice, and that an older celtic tradition would not necessarily have placed the bonfire nights within specific months at all. I admit that beyond the recognition that Halloween does not seem to historically fit exactly with Samhain, all else is speculation based on whatever pieces of archeological evidence one wishes to cite in support of ones thesis.

However, if a pagan says to you (as one said to me, some years ago) “Halloween is Samhain, and that festival is one of ours”, politely point out to them that Halloween is not the real date of Samhain, and that All Saints day is very much a Church festival, and has been for nearly 1200 years.

The ancient Romans took March as the first month of the year. That is why “December” is the “tenth month”, and why we form Leap Years by adding an extra day at the end of February, which would have been at the end of the Year.

When Christians began to count years from the time of Christ (which they did not do until more than five hundred years after the event), they took the crucial event to be, not the Circumcision, or the Birth, but Christ’s conception, nine months before the Birth.

They calculated this value back from the date of December 25th, which we know is not the actual date of Christ’s birth, but more of an “official” birth day.

Therefore, they began the New Year with 25 March, even though it may be that 25th January is as good a candidate (9 months before Christ’s actual birth date - perhaps)

It was not until the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar (adopted in Roman Catholic countries in 1582, and in the UK in 1752), that the New Year was considered to begin on 1 January.

The Gregorian Calendar and Julian Calendar were out of step with one another, so when the Gregorian Calendar was adopted in the UK, some 12 days were “lost” to bring the calendars back into sync. Thus 25th March + 12 days became 6th April.

In the UK, the tax year still runs from 6th April to 5th April for this very reason.

When there was all the fuss about whether 2000 or 2001 was the first year of the third millennium, many people forgot that 1st January was not the traditional first day of the millennium! But rest assured, I held my millennium party on 6th April 2001!

October 12th is Columbus day, but what is the real deal with Columbus? I am frequently presented with arguments such as this:

This sort of thing goes back to Ptolomy’s opinion that Earth is flat, such is “peer review” that all evidence to the contrary was rejected for about one and a half thousand years until Columbus sailed to the West Indies.

 

The issue with Columbus was not whether the Earth was round, but whether one could find a shorter passage to India by sailing west. You see, there had been some rather accurate measurements of the circumference of the Earth. The Greek philospher Erastothenes had measured the circumference of the Earth in 230BC by looking into wells on the summer solstice to measure shadow lengths at two locations at the same time.

The locations were Syene and Alexandria, some 500 miles apart, and the difference in shadow lengths allowed him to calculate the circumference of the Earth using some clever trigonometry.

His first figure wasn’t at all bad. Indeed, whilst he underestimated the circumference of the Earth somewhat, he was as close as experimental error might allow.

Now Ptolemy, who the above quoted writer incorrectly tells us posited the flat earth, had an estimate of his own for the circumference of the Earth. His estimate made the Earth much smaller than it is. King Ferdinand knew of the estimate of Erastothenes and others, and when Columbus told him that he knew a shorter westward way to India, Ferdinand turned him down on the basis of Erastothenes’ estimates.

Imagine if you replaced the continents of America with water, and you wanted to travel directly westward to India - your journey would involve crossing the Atlantic, the breadth of America and the Pacific ocean before you could make landfall.

As you can see, Ferdinand was right to reject Columbus’s mistaken calculations, and Columbus was lucky that America was where it was, to break his journey, or else he would have surely died. This mistake made by Columbus is why he named the place he made landfall as the “West Indies”. He mistakenly thought he had proven his calculation correct, and that he was in the west of India!

This myth about Columbus seems to have been put out by one or two atheists. Particularly the French historian Antoine-Jean Letronne (1787-1848) and the American satirist Washington Irving (1783-1859). Apologists - particularly for Letronne - argue that he was simply working from questionable sources, but the prevalence of the Columbus myth is a good example of how atheists will abandon critical thinking and good scholarship when it comes to pushing an anti Christian view (something they often accuse Christians of doing in the other direction. Of course, no one is immune from this. That is how our brains are wired up).

So what do we see from this?

1. Columbus rejected peer review, was completely wrong, but was spared from death by pure fluke, and the gift of the gab (he pretended - against all evidence - that the West Indies were fabulously rich with Gold, in an attempt to justify his trip).
2. Academic study can reveal remarkably accurate and useful results, but peer review is essential to the process. All but Columbus rejected Ptolomy’s measure, because Erastothenes’ method was superior (indeed we are not told Ptolomy’s method at all).
3. The quoted writer above, like far too many people, are willing to accept information they are told uncritically. Such facts are blithely quoted about Columbus et al., but are just plain wrong. Like so many things, people like to think they know a lot because they learned facts about such things, whereas a lack of critical thinking shows that they really understand very little.
4. Atheists do not have a monopoly on good critical thinking skills.
5. Sometimes it is better to be lucky than right!