Catholic New World staff writer Michelle Martin with Peter Gilmour.

Dr. Peter Gilmour, 60, a professor at Loyola University Chicago’s Institute of Pastoral Studies, isn’t one of those people who fear that the ghosts and goblins of Halloween will promote worship of Satan. Rather, he said, the fall festival and its pre-Christian roots speak to a universal human need to balance life and death, darkness and light. He will speak about “Reclaiming the Sacred Roots of Halloween” Oct. 31 at the Catholic Festival of Faith on Navy Pier.

The Catholic New World: What are the roots of Halloween?

Peter Gilmour: Halloween is really a pre-Christian festival, and it has its roots in both druidic and Roman pre-Christian times. The druids populated [what is now the] United Kingdom, Northern Europe, places like that, and they had these festivals that centered around the end of summer and the beginning of fall. They talked about the end of the living season and the beginning of the dying season.

The end of the summer season was the harvest time, so at the beginning, Halloween was a type of harvest festival, a thanks-giving for a good growing season and getting ready for the dark season.

Then came the Romans, about 45 A.D. roughly speaking. They conquered the druidic lands and they brought their festivals to that area. They also had a goddess of the harvest, Pomona was her name, and her symbol was an apple. It might have been that our bobbing for apples comes from that. Both the druidic and the Roman festivals also had things connected with the spirits about them in various fashions.

All these traditions kind of fused together from these two different cultures. Then comes Christianity several hundred later.

TCNW: How did Christianity try to meld these festivals into the Christian tradition?

PG: Primarily through All Saints’ Day. All Saints’ Day was celebrated by various local Christian churches at different times of the year.

But as Christianity grew, it became more centralized as kind of a late spring festival, celebrated subsequent to Pentecost. But because … the living and the dead communicating with each other and things like that were so much part of the culture from pre-Christian days, Christianity moved the feast to the days around the druidic and Roman holidays in order to capitalize on them. That’s kind of how they became Christian, if you will.

Looking at Halloween, or All Hallow’s Eve, on Oct. 31, All Saints’ Day on Nov. 1 and All Souls Day on Nov. 2—and All Souls Day doesn’t really start manifesting itself in a big way until the Middle Ages—these are all just collected together, and there are these wonderful porous boundaries between pre-Christian festivals and Christian festivals. That’s kind of where we are today.

TCNW: Now we have porous boundaries between Christian festivals and consumer festivals.

PG: That’s another matter entirely. There’s Christmas, too. Halloween is the second-most successful consumer holiday of the year. Close to $7 billion is spent annually on Halloween. It’s just absolutely amazing to me.

TCNW: Where do the ghosts and costumes come in?

PG: That’s probably one of the most misunderstood things. Back in the druidic days, this time between the light season and the dark season was not considered time. These were kind of “days out of time.” Therefore, you could act and do things extraordinarily differently than you could the rest of the year. So the idea of dressing up as who you were not—real people dressing up as ghosts, rich dressing up as poor, poor dressing up as rich—that was all part of this in-between time. They just reveled in it. Because it was a time when the natural order of things wasn’t in effect, you could communicate with the other world, and that’s all a piece of this too.

Belief in ghosts is seen as sort of strange today. But the presence of visions, these links between this world and the eternal world, are strong ones when it comes to religion and faith and particularly in the Catholic Church. For example, one of the things that has to happen when a person is up for beatification or sainthood is they look for a miracle to have taken place through his or her intercession. So there’s a recognition of a connection between this world and the eternal world, and that communication can actually happen.

Ghosts also appear because there’s something amiss between this world and the next world.

TCNW: How does the history touch on modern spirituality?

PG: We’re really entering into what some authors have called an interspiritual age, and this interspiritual age is one that does not exclusively deal with one religious tradition and make enemies out of all the others. The interspiritual age looks for the truth and the wisdom and the meaning in all spiritual traditions, in all religious traditions, and sees them as coming together rather than being enemies or oppositional.

When we look at the history of Halloween, we really see how an interspiritual age can capture the wisdom and the commonalities among several different spiritual and religious traditions. If you look at the document “Nostra Aetate” from Vatican II, on the relationship of the church with non-Christian traditions, it affirms everything that is good and true and meaningful in other religious traditions and how we can learn from them.

Then you have a person like John Paul II, who was the first pope ever to go to a synagogue and the first pope ever to go to a mosque.

We are entering an age of religious pluralism, wherin the old boundaries and the idea that only in Catholicism, or in many other religious traditions, do you have 100 percent truth reflected and nowhere else, ever. That’s old thinking. When we look at what’s happening, not only in this country but also in lots of other countries in this world, we really see more and more people of vastly different backgrounds coming together. In this country the rise in the number of Hindus and Buddhists, of Muslims, has been quite significant. Our children are sitting next to these people in school, they are our neighbors, we’re serving on school boards and library boards with them. A whole new paradigm is emerging.

My point is, when we flip back to Halloween and we see the commonalities of beliefs from pre-Christian and Christian times, and not looking at these things as oppositional, but looking at all these traditions as having significant wisdom.

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