THE CAULDRON REPORT

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Raymond S. G. Foster

16 days ago

High Elder Warlock

Power Poster

HALLOWEEN IS REALLY PAGAN...NO.

Halloween WAS A Catholic Observance

Every year we see the same slop repeated in one form or another, regurgitating the same nonsense and then used as a platform to redirect people's beliefs towards something often contrary or "darker or spooky" which is all pseudo-history slop.

The first thing we need to do is clear up the nonsense from modern fictions and go back to actual historical facts. To note, Samhain is recorded in Sanas Cormaic (Cormac's Glossary), written around 900 c.e. by Cormac mac Cuilennáin, the king-bishop of Munster. He explicitly glossed samain as "summer sunset" which was around the end of modern September to the first part of October.

Cormac specifically writes: samfuin .i. fuin in t-samraid ("sam-fuin, that is, the sunset/end of summer"). It shows here that he was also more or less reinventing words which many scholars have cited assuming it had more of a sense of gathering (less in the sense of an assembly than literally collecting crops) and often state it seems Cormac was creating folk etymology.

As a side not, whenever you see in linguistic research things involving so called proto-, proto-indo-, or indo- (whatever) is presented, it is itself a form of "folk etymology" because any word that has a * in front of it is an invented structure, not a known or recorded example anywhere.

Fact 1:

The Old Irish calendar, which most of the sources draw from in their later fictions spun as facts was a three season system, not four. These were named:

Earrach (Spring): February, March, April, May
Samrad (Summer): June, July, August, September
Gaimred (Winter): October, November, December, January

In all recorded eras of the Irish language, the word for sun is grian.

Fact 2:

The terms Imbolc, Bealtaine, and Samain were not actually names of months in early Ireland—they were names of quarter-day festival nodes that anchored the seasons. They were anchored as:

The start of Spring: February 1st (Imbolc)
The start of Summer: June 1st (Bealtaine)
The start of Winter: October 1st (Samain with November being Mí Gam, the core winter month), yet the following facts will show it was closer to July/August.

Fact 3:

In the early three-season framework, rather than having a unique name for each month, a month was named strictly by its place in its respective 4-month season block using the modifiers Cét (First/Beginning), Medón (Middle), and Deired (End). The adopted and adapted 12 month named concept:

February: Cét-Errech (First of Spring)
March: Medón Erraich (Middle of Spring)
April: Dered-Errech (End of Spring)
May: Cétamain (First of Summer)
June: Mithemain / Medón Samain (Middle of Summer)
July: Dered-Samain (End of Summer)
August: Cét-Fogamar (First of Autumn/Harvest period)
September: Medón Fogmair (Middle of Harvest)
October: Dered Fogamar (End of Harvest)
November: Mí Gam (The Winter Month)
December: Medón Gaim / Medón Geimrid (Middle of Winter)
January: Dered Gaim / Dered Geimrid (End of Winter))

The oldest recorded Old Irish manuscripts (like the early glosses) simply "Gaelicized" the Roman Latin names because no native words existed for those specific calendar concepts or adapted the systems for a less Latin specific and more native familiar set of terms and expressions, more often than not to bridge linguistic gaps (which is not unique).

For more clarity, the Old Irish word for end is crích (meaning boundary, limit, or end), which evolved into the modern Irish word críoch. Other Old/Early Irish terms related to "end" include:

deired (remainder, residue, or end), which evolved into Modern Irish deireadh.
déidenach (final or last).
Crích in tSamraid more accurately means the "end of the summer"

Samhain is strictly treated as an agricultural, legal, and seasonal boundary marker. It marked the end of the pastoral summer, the time when livestock were brought down from summer pastures, and the beginning of the winter half of the year. The invention of Samhain as a pagan death festival was fabricated in the 18th century onward, and mutated over time.

THE NAMESAKE OF HALLOWEEN AND IMPORTANT DETAILS

Halloween gets its name from All Hallows' Eve— from Germanic sources as the vigil night before All Saints' Day. It was created as part of a three-day Catholic liturgical observance called Allhallowtide.

Factually, the oldest surviving Irish monastic calendars and martyrologies track the dead through specific feasts:

The Félire Óengusso (Martyrology of Óengus, c. 800 AD): This early Old Irish text chronicles the daily feasts of saints and martyrs.
The Feast of All Martyrs (May or June): Following early Eastern and Roman Christian traditions, the early Irish Church originally commemorated the collective holy dead in the late spring or early summer, completely removed from the autumn season.
Daily Monastic Prayers: Commemoration of the community's deceased relatives and monks occurred daily during the Liturgy of the Hours and the Mass, tied to the Roman calendar dates of individual saints' deaths (natale), not a centralized autumn festival.

The transition of "death" observances to the turn of November occurred through a documented timeline of church administration, not native Celtic pagan survival:

835 AD Roman Decree: Pope Gregory IV officially moved the Feast of All Saints (Festum Omnium Sanctorum) from May to November 1st for the entire Carolingian Empire, a date heavily influenced by Germanic and Frankish church preferences.
Monastic Adoption: Irish monasteries, operating under the Julian calendar and interacting with Continental Europe, adopted this Latin liturgical change. The evening before this feast—October 31st (All Hallows' Eve, or Halloween)—became sacred purely because of its structural placement directly preceding the imported Latin feast day.
11th-Century Addition: The specific day for remembering the general dead—All Souls' Day—was established on November 2nd by Odilo of Cluny in the 11th century.

When the modern secular world observes October 31st as a time associated with ghosts and the dead, it is continuing a holiday structure imported from medieval Christian Rome, which was layered on top of the old Irish agricultural calendar centuries after the pre-Christian era had passed.

Early Irish culture did have deeply significant religious observances for honoring and remembering the dead, but these were entirely Christian, liturgical, and explicitly decoupled from the native seasonal marker of Samhain while any pre-Christian observations tended to be less organized, and more specific to the time someone passed, observation of various burial customs and tended to be something friends and family and neighbors tended to based on local traditions and customs based more in concepts of necessity.

THE ASSOCIATION WITH THE TERM "HELL NIGHT or HELL'S NIGHT"

The term "Hell Night" also originates from this (and its companion names like Devil's Night) comes directly from the traditional Catholic theological triad of the Days of the Dead:

October 31 (All Hallows' Eve): The vigil night of prayer before the feast day. Associated with the Damned / The Reality of Hell. The Church Militant
November 1 (All Saints' Day): Established by Pope Gregory IV in 835 AD to honor all Christian martyrs and saints. The Saved / The Saints in Heaven (Church Triumphant)
November 2 (All Souls' Day): Established around 1000 AD to pray for souls in Purgatory. The Suffering / The Souls in Purgatory (Church Suffering)

In old Irish and Scottish folk custom which derived directly from this, rather than prior concepts, the idea behind it was that because November 1 celebrated the saints in Heaven and November 2 was set aside to pray for souls in Purgatory, October 31 was informally assigned to acknowledge the reality of Hell, the damned, and the fallen angels and, so Irish and Scottish traditions also included praying for the eventual redemption of the damned.

When you look at the exact customs practiced in Ireland and Scotland on the 31st, every single one of them ties directly back to Catholic intercession for the dead and fear of Hell/Purgatory.

Where the Halloween Traditions Actually Came From

Trick-or-Treating: Comes from the medieval Catholic custom of Souling. Poor Christians walked door-to-door offering prayers for deceased relatives in exchange for small baked goods called "soul cakes." Begging at the Door was called "Souling" and "Guising" originally. People walked door-to-door on October 31st singing songs and begging for food (like soul cakes). In return, the beggars promised to recite prayers—specifically the De Profundis (Psalm 130) or Rosaries—for the deceased family members of the household to pull them out of Purgatory.
Costumes / Guising: In medieval Europe, Catholic parishes that couldn't afford expensive holy relics had parishioners dress up as saints, angels, and parish demons to commemorate the holy day. The disguises worn in early Scottish and Irish traditions weren't based on "ancient pagan monsters." They represented the poor souls in Purgatory or demons dragging unrepentant sinners to Hell. Parishes actively used these visual representations to remind the living to repent and pray for the dead.
Prayers at Graveyards ("A Porta Inferi"): Catholic liturgy for the dead explicitly prays: "From the gate of hell, O Lord, deliver their souls." On the night of October 31st, families held candlelit vigils in graveyards to plead for Christ's mercy on those undergoing punishment in the afterlife.
Leaving Out Food and Lighting Candles: Families in Ireland and Scotland cleaned their houses on October 31st, lit candles, and left food on the table. This was done as a Catholic act of hospitality for the departed souls of their ancestors, who were believed to be permitted to visit their earthly homes during this holy vigil to seek prayers from their living relatives.
Jack-o'-Lanterns: Turnip lanterns were used in Ireland and Britain to carry embers home from night vigil masses, tied to local folk tales about will-o'-the-wisps, not pagan ritual sacrifice. In America it developed into the pumpkin.

The moniker "Hell Night" is closely tied to the Irish legend of Jack-o'-the-Lantern. According to Irish folklore, Stingy Jack was a sinful man who tricked the Devil. When Jack died, God refused to let him into Heaven, and the Devil—having promised never to take Jack's soul—refused to let him into Hell.

The Devil threw Jack a burning ember direct from the fires of Hell to light his way through eternal darkness. Jack carved out a turnip, placed the hellfire ember inside, and was condemned to wander the night forever. Turnip lanterns were carved on October 31 as a stark memento mori (a warning of mortality): a visual symbol of a damned soul trapped outside of grace, reminding people on "Hell Night" not to live a life that leads to Hell.

Catholic theology holds that while saints are in Heaven and souls in Purgatory can be aided by prayers, the damned in Hell are lost forever. An idea that was not always as popular as many assume. In popular Irish Catholic belief, on the night before the holy Saints were commemorated, the dark forces of Hell, demons, and damned spirits were visually portrayed, mocked, and warded off before the holy days began.

Masks and costumes worn by youths in rural Ireland on October 31 were specifically designed to represent demons, devils, and tormented souls. By mocking and visually depicting the grotesque reality of Hell on October 31, the community symbolically asserted that the Christ and His saints (honored the very next morning) held ultimate victory over Satan and damnation.

Just before the more innocent version of Halloween came to be as an adaptation, Hell Night/Halloween started getting extreme. Because October 31 represented the reality of Hell and demonic deception before the divine order of All Saints' Day, Irish folk tradition allowed a brief period of controlled chaos (but the controlled part fell to the roadside).

Youths would play tricks, unhinge gates, and cause minor anarchy. This "Hell Night" chaos served a moral purpose: it acted as a living illustration of what the world looks like without God's grace—a chaotic place ruled by trickery, darkness, and confusion.

1. The Shift from Agricultural Pranks to Urban Destruction

Historically, the "controlled chaos" of Hell Night served a specific purpose in tight-knit agrarian communities in Ireland and Scotland. The pranks were self-limiting social commentary: unhinging a notoriously greedy neighbor’s gate, moving a hoard of cabbages onto a stingy farmer’s roof, or hiding a landlord’s wagon wheels. Everyone knew who was doing it, and the moral point was clear.

However, when mass migration pushed Irish and Scottish customs into dense, industrialized cities (both in Great Britain and across North America), the social control mechanisms broke down:

In urban centers, pranksters weren’t targeting neighbors they knew; they were targeting anonymous property.
Harmless farm mischief turned into genuine property destruction—smashing store windows, unseating streetcar rails, setting fires, and cutting power lines.
The "controlled" element vanished, leaving behind pure civil disorder that local governments could no longer tolerate.

2. The Great Depression & The 1930s Crisis

The breaking point occurred during the 1920s and 1930s. With economic desperation high during the Great Depression, Hell Night / Mischief Night escalated into full-scale urban riots in major cities.

Youth gangs used the guise of "Hell Night" to commit severe arson, assault police officers, and cause millions of dollars in structural damage. Civic leaders, business owners, and police forces across North America and Britain reached a tipping point and declared that the tradition had to be eradicated.

3. The "Sanitization Movement" and Suburban Re-Engineering

Instead of just trying to arrest thousands of teenagers, civic organizations, schools, local businesses, and police departments launched a deliberate campaign in the late 1930s through the 1950s to re-engineer Halloween into a child-friendly, commercialized holiday:

The Bribery Strategy ("Trick or Treat"): To stop kids from committing acts of "Hell Night" mischief, communities systematically introduced organized door-to-door candy collection. The phrase "Trick or Treat" was explicitly framed as a bribe: "Give me a treat, or I will resort to the old Hell Night trick."
Civic Extravaganzas: Towns began hosting mandatory costume parades, school dances, and community carnivals on October 31st to keep youths supervised, indoors, and exhausted.
Child-Centric Shift: The focus of October 31st was deliberately taken away from rowdy teenagers and young adults and given entirely to toddlers and primary school children.
Deprecation of Theological Darkness: The intense, terrifying themes of damnation, purgatorial suffering, and devilry were stripped away or reduced to cartoonish, plastic decorations (like happy ghosts and cute witches) to ensure the holiday was commercially palatable and morally safe for young kids.

So that is how Halloween and "Hell Night" being converged was banned and suppressed because urbanization turned a traditional social safety-valve into unmanageable crime. It is also the real basis to prevent citywide property destruction every October 31st, 20th-century civic authorities neutralized the holiday—replacing the threat of "Hell Night" mischief with structured, candy-driven trick-or-treating for children, and not just a creation of "corporate greed" to sell crap and candy.

What about Halloween being the time when The Veil Thins?

it's not ancient at all, well, depending what you consider ancient. The idea of "the veil between the living and the dead becoming thin" originated in the 19th-century Victorian Spiritualism movement and was later merged with Halloween in the early-to-mid 20th century by modern occultists and then gobbled up by Neopagan hippies which are themselves little more than largely pseudo-religions.

Not only did this concept not exist in old Irish or Catholic literature, it was coined during the Victorian Spiritualism craze of the mid-1800s (which exploded in America and Europe starting around 1848 with the Fox Sisters and séance culture).

The Metaphor's Origin: Spiritualist mediums borrows biblical imagery (specifically the "veil of the Temple" in the New Testament) to describe the boundary separating the physical earth from the spirit world. Mediums claimed they possessed special gifts to "lift," "traverse," or "pierce" the veil to speak with ghosts during séances.
No Calendar Connection: Originally in Spiritualism, "the veil" didn't thin on a specific calendar date like October 31—mediums claimed they could pierce the veil anytime at a séance.

The fusion of the Spiritualist "thin veil" concept with October 31 happened in two stages during the late 19th and mid-20th centuries:

Stage A: Sir John Rhys & James Frazer (1880s–1890s)

As Victorian anthropologists like Sir John Rhys (1886) and Sir James George Frazer (1890) pushed their theories about Samhain being a "Celtic New Year," they borrowed the trendy occult terminology of their day. They described October 31st as a night when the "boundary" or "veil" between worlds was open, using Victorian spiritualist jargon to re-explain old Irish folk tales.

Stage B: Neopaganism & Wicca (1950s–1970s)

When modern Neopagan and Wican movements were codified in the mid-20th century (largely shaped by figures like Gerald Gardner), they adopted the Victorian antiquarian theories as literal ancient history. They took the 19th-century Spiritualist metaphor—"the veil is thinnest on Samhain"—and placed it directly into their religious doctrine.

In actual medieval Irish sagas and folklore, there was never a concept of a cosmic "veil" that thinned once a year:

The Otherworld was Always Accessible: In Gaelic mythology, the Sídhe (the Otherworld or fairy mounds) were permanent physical locations in the landscape (like burial mounds or caves). Irish heroes and gods entered and exited these mounds at all times of the year, not just on Samhain.
Dusk/Dawn as Liminal Times: The Gaels viewed transitions (like dusk, dawn, or seasonal turns) as liminal times, but they described them as physical openings—like a door on a burial mound swinging open—not a mystical, floating "veil" that gets thin.

If anyone tells you the Celts believed "the veil between the living and the dead thins on October 31st," they are quoting a 19th-century Victorian séance metaphor without knowing this or any of the presented information that was slapped onto Halloween by 20th-century occult writers.

Again its Christian/Catholic based origins. When Jesus/Yoshuah... the Christ/Messiah... died, the Gospels state that the veil of the temple was rent (split) in two. Early Christian writers and 18th-century writers began using "behind the veil" as a poetic euphemism for death—meaning a person had passed beyond the curtain into Heaven (hopefully at least).

Key figures who popularized this exact phrasing in the 1850s included:

Andrew Jackson Davis (The "Poughkeepsie Seer"): In his 1847 book The Harmonia and his newspaper The Univercoelum, Davis—one of the foundational philosophers of American Spiritualism—repeatedly wrote about spirits residing just beyond "a thin, visible veil" separating the material sphere from the spiritual sphere.
Cora L. V. Scott (Trance Medium): In the 1850s, Scott was one of the most famous public "trance speakers" in America. In her widely published lectures, she regularly used the phrase "reaching beyond the veil between the living and the dead" to explain how her mediumship worked.
Spiritualist Periodicals (1850s–1860s): Newspapers like The Banner of Light (Boston) and The Spiritual Telegraph (New York) printed thousands of trance speeches and séance transcriptions. By 1855, phrases like "lifting the veil between the two worlds" and "the thin veil that divides the living from the departed" were standard vocabulary across all Spiritualist publications.
Modern Wica and Neopaganism (1950s–1970s): Figures like Gerald Gardner (the founder of Wicca) and later writers like Raymond Buckland took the 19th-century Spiritualist metaphor literally. They incorporated "the thinning of the veil at Samhain" into Neopagan ritual liturgy, teaching it as an ancient doctrine when it was actually Victorian séance slang.

Who Created the "Pagan Samhain" Myth?

If Halloween was a standard medieval Catholic observance, where did the story that "it was originally pagan" come from? It was fabricated in the late 18th and 19th centuries by Protestant-era antiquarians coming up with more or less attacks on Catholics and Catholicism (which Catholics in kind did as well) and Victorian writers being creative and using imagination more than anything else.

Step 1: General Charles Vallancey (1786)

Who he was: An English military engineer and amateur writer living in Ireland.
The Claim: In 1786, he claimed that Samhain was not just the Gaelic word for November, but a pagan "god of the dead" or "Lord of Death." He claimed ancient Druids offered human sacrifices to this deity on October 31.
The Reality: Vallancey barely spoke Irish and relied on wildly fake language theories (like trying to prove Irish came from ancient Phoenician). There was never a Celtic god named Samhain.

Step 2: Sir John Rhys (1886)

Who he was: An Oxford professor of Celtic studies.
The Claim: In 1886, Rhys declared that Samhain was the universal "Celtic New Year" and a night when spirits walked the earth, making it the parent festival of Halloween.
The Reality: Modern historians like Ronald Hutton have shown that Rhys had zero solid evidence. Medieval Irish texts describe Samhain as a time for harvesting crops and slaughtering cattle for winter—not a "Cosmic Pagan New Year."

Step 3: Sir James George Frazer (1890)

Who he was: A famous Scottish anthropologist.
The Claim: In his 1890 book The Golden Bough, Frazer smashed Vallancey's "death god" story and Rhys's "Celtic New Year" story together, publishing it as undeniable fact.
The Impact: The Golden Bough became a global bestseller. Encyclopedias and newspapers copied Frazer's claims, cementing the false story into modern pop culture.
Frazer presented Samhain as:
- a Celtic festival of the dead
- the pagan predecessor of Halloween

Although Frazer never explicitly stated that “Halloween’s original name was Samhain,” his sweeping comparative method blurred distinctions between Christian feast days, medieval folk customs, and hypothetical pagan rituals. As a result, later writers and popular audiences treated Frazer’s conjectures as established fact, collapsing Samhain and Halloween into a single, falsely continuous tradition.

Why the "Pagan Halloween" Claims Are Nonsense

Nonsense Claim 1: "The Catholic Church moved All Saints' Day to November 1 to cover up Samhain."
- Fact: All Saints' Day was moved to November 1 in Rome and Germany by Popes and Frankish kings to handle mass crowds of pilgrims after harvest time. It was established in Mediterranean and Germanic Europe long before Gaelic Ireland adopted the Roman Catholic calendar.
Nonsense Claim 2: "Samhain was an ancient pagan deity."
- Fact: Samhain simply translates to "summer's end" in Old Irish and is still the modern Irish word for the month of November. General Vallancey invented the "God of Death" narrative out of thin air in 1786.
Nonsense Claim 3: "Samhain was the Celtic New Year."
- Fact: Medieval Irish, Scottish, and Welsh calendars do not list November 1 as the start of the year. This idea was manufactured by John Rhys in 1886.

Early Christian Influence on All Hallows’ Eve

All Hallows’ Eve (Halloween) emerged purely from Christian liturgical practice. The vigil was intended to honor the dead saints and prepare spiritually for All Saints’ Day, not to preserve or mimic any pagan festival. This distinction is often glossed over in popular accounts.

Modern historians and Celtic scholars are clear:

Halloween derives from All Hallows’ Eve, a Christian vigil preceding All Saints’ Day.
Samhain was a Gaelic seasonal marker, not a Christian holiday and not the name of Halloween.
While the two share a calendar proximity and some later folk customs, Samhain was never the name of Halloween, nor was Halloween simply a renamed pagan feast.

Bottom Line

The claim that Halloween is an ancient pagan festival rooted in Samhain is an 18th-century fabrication that got repeated enough times in Victorian books to become accepted as pop-culture "fact" and a justification for boring paranoid people to either claim it as a time of all things evil and sinful (when its not) or everything pagan and a religious day of various so called neo -pagan groups.

Halloween, in truth, began as a Catholic vigil for All Saints' Day in November. The narrative pushed by "Neo-whatevers"—that "they stole it from us"—is nothing more than a fiction used to justify further ignorance. When confronted with historical facts, their usual responses boil down to, "It's lies, it's not true," or "They appropriated and remade it, but it's not what it originally was—it was our culture!"

It’s laughable because the actual facts stand clear against the muddled rhetoric spun around this time of year (and during almost every other holiday or observance). People cling to these myths because they want an excuse to treat others poorly, rather than simply embracing history and remaining honest about how traditions adapt over time.

IN CLOSING

Instead of appreciating fascinating history, they demand cultural fictions to feed their own baggage and resentment, all because their parents made them go to a church, mosque, or synagogue as kids.

In short, distorting history to feed a personal grudge only proves that you are still controlled by the very thing you claim to have outgrown.

To borrow the words of Albert Einstein in his commentary about militant fanatical atheists, those who let childhood resentment drive their revisionist hostility behave "like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains."

It is time to let go of the emotional baggage, accept the historical facts, and finally grow up and get out of their own way.

The claim that Samhain was “the original name for Halloween” is now recognized as an error—not merely an oversimplification, but a speculative reconstruction falsely presented as historical fact during the 19th and early 20th centuries, later amplified by popular culture, neopagan literature, and modern media.

Pagan Revival nonesense & Neo-Pagan Reinterpretation

Modern neo-pagan and Wiccan traditions often claim Samhain as Halloween, but this is a revivalist reinterpretation, not a continuation of historical practice. Popular myths are reinforced by contemporary spiritual movements, which can confuse historical and modern usage.

Archaeological Evidence

While seasonal rituals and feasting were common in Iron Age Ireland, there is no clear evidence of any festival exactly resembling modern Halloween. Continuity claims between Samhain and Halloween are therefore speculative, not factual.

Halloween is not an ancient pagan festival, and Samhain was never its original name.

The modern understanding is a product of: