Y Safle

It’s that time of year again. Kids getting ready to demand money (or something) with menaces. Kids dressing up a broom with an old sock stuffed with paper and demanding money (without menaces). Kids throwing fireworks around and loud bangs in the night. Bah humbug!

So where does this all come from? Halloween, we are told, derives from the Celtic festival of Samhain, and heralds the end of the Celtic year, the night when the world draws close to the otherworld. Only it has often struck me as odd that the pre-Romanised Celts would just happen to end their year so neatly on the last day of a Roman calendar month.

And what is Bonfire Night? Isn’t that all about some Guy who wanted to blow up parliament and install a Catholic king? Why mention it on a page all about Celtic interests?

Guy Fawkes, it turns out, has very little to do with Bonfire Night. Yes, the gunpowder plot was foiled on November 5th, but this just happened to be the Bonfire Night already. Guy Fawkes was not burned at the stake, as some suppose. He was hanged drawn and quartered (the normal punishment meted out at that time to traitors).

The bonfires of the start of November were a much older (Celtic) tradition. The throwing of an effigy onto these bonfires was also an old tradition - the effigies were the Celtic green men.

Sir James Frazer wrote extensively about the fire festivals of Europe in his 1922 magnus opus, “the Golden Bough”. In this work he points out that the Celts, early farmers, timed the end of their year with the time when herdsmen would bring their cattle down from the hills to winter pastures, and after the harvest is gathered in and stored.

Since ancient times, Celts have reckoned the year to end on Bonfire Night, and as autumn gives way to winter, this world and the otherworld are indeed supposed to be at their closest point (an idea perhaps helped by autumnal mists which can turn to heavy fogs in early November).

The Bonfire celebration, and the burning of effigies covered in evergreen boughs, are a memory of a log forgotten superstitious past. Much of this is detailed in the Golden Bough, Chapters 62-64.

However, Sir James Frazer missed one point. He speaks, as so many of us do, of the Celtic New Year as starting on November 1st, and Samhain as being 31st October (see chapter 62, section 6). This is a mistake.

Long before the Roman calendar, the Samhain fires were burning year in and year out. We know that Celts based festivals on dates calculated from astronomical recordings, and it is worth noting that the night of November 5th is located exactly half way between autumnal equinox and the winter solstice. Beltain is half way between vernal equinox and summer solstice. Thus the significant date is indeed 5th November. The Celtic festival is 5th November - not 31st October.

Halloween derives from a Christian festival on another date that just happens to have similarities with Samhain, but the true Celtic festival is Bonfire Night. So when some child rings your doorbell this week, tell them to come back next week.

And while you are at it, you may like to point out that guising, of which trick or treat is a mere corruption, involves the recital of a piece of poetry, or the singing of a song for some reward. You can offer them such a reward at your bonfire celebration if you like… at least if they are really obnoxious, you can (however fleetingly) consider throwing them on it instead! On second thoughts, perhaps not… but at least the idea might give you a warm fuzzy feeling. :o)

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!