The Origins of Halloween:
Season of the Crone
By Barbara G. Walker
Halloween,
Samhain, All Hallows, All Saints or Hallow-Eve is the season of the Crone. In
ancient paganism, the word Crone denoted an elder priestess or tribal
matriarch; a cognate word is "crown," the symbol of a leader. The
word was made pejorative when the Christian Church redefined all elder
priestesses of the old religion as malevolent witches. Similarly, the word
"hag" was once derived from Greek hagia—a holy woman—and also
became a Christianized term for a witch.
The
divine Crone was originally a part of the trinitarian Goddess, who appeared in
Maiden, Mother and Crone forms, associated with the three phases of woman's
life, the three phases of the moon and the annual cycles of nature. Viewed as
an underworld deity who cared for the dead, the Goddess as Crone ruled autumnal
harvest festivals, when the spirits of dead ancestors could visit their
descendants and share in the harvest feast. Among the Celts, the well-known
"death's head at the feast" used to be an actual skull of an
ancestor, set at the table to receive offerings, often with a candle set within
it, to simulate the warmth of life and the light of vision. Such was the origin
of the jack-o-lantern.
Candy
"We still give
children candy at Halloween, but we have forgotten why."
In
southeast Asia, harvest customs still involve food offerings to ancestors at
the holiday known as the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts. In Mexico, it is called
the Day of the Dead, characterized by honoring the ancestors and feeding the
children little candy skulls as the memento mori. Feeding children treats on
holy days is a long-established human habit, originally designed not only to
make such occasions memorable for the children, but also to show visiting
tribal spirits that the next generation is here, needing their continued help
in maintaining the food supply for the tribe. We still give children candy at
Halloween, but we have forgotten why.
Skulls
and Masks
The
skull was an important symbol of the divine Crone, often envisioned as
her true face, veiled like everyone’s skull by the mask of flesh. Typically,
she was also hidden behind a black veil. Various traditions claimed that one
might see her true visage only in one’s final moments of life, not as in a
glass darkly, but then face to face....
Masks, covering the face, were
used in sacred drama and other ceremonies to represent the presence of deity.
To put on the mask, in ancient times, was often interpreted as a literal
assumption of the divine spirit that the mask embodied. The animal-headed
deities of ancient Egypt began as priests and priestesses wearing totemic
animal masks. The wolf and bear clans of northern Europe wore masks of the
appropriate animals for religious rites and considered themselves inwardly
possessed by their sacred beasts. Such traditions gave rise not only to common
surnames like Wolf and Baer, but also to legends of werewolves
("man-wolves") and berserkers (warriors who became possessed by
battle-frenzy when wearing the "bear sark" or bearskin).
"Mask wearing for
religious purposes has been common throughout history."
Mask
wearing for religious purposes has been common throughout history.... When
mask-wearing was associated with pagan ancestor worship and religious rituals
of the common people, it is hardly surprising to find it still extant in the
only pagan religious holiday that the Church never managed to pre-empt and turn
to its own use: Halloween.
Many
versions of the Crone Goddess coalesced into the churchmen’s image of the
"Queen of Witches"... Up to the 19th century, it was an official
Article of Faith of the Catholic Church to believe in the existence of an
underground "Queen of Witches," who usually had one of three possible
names: Hecate, Persephone or Lilith. All three of these were formerly Crone
figures of the original female Holy Trinity.
"Up
to the 19th century, it was an official Article of Faith of the Catholic Church
to believe in the existence of an underground 'Queen of Witches'..."
Hecate
and Persephone
A Greek
version of the ancient trinity was made up of Hebe, the springtime maiden (Roman
Flora); Hera, the Queen of Heaven and mother of the gods; and Hecate, the
Crone, ruler of the underworld of the dead. Hecate’s male consort was Hades
(Roman Pluto). Porphyry and other classical writers sometimes considered Hecate
the whole trinity, appearing as Hecate Selene, the new moon in heaven; Hecate
Artemis, the full-moon spirit of nature; and Hecate Persephone, the waning moon
representing death and the nether regions. She was worshipped at three-way
crossroads as Hecate Trevia, "Hecate of the Three Ways." Her images
stood at crossroads to receive offerings from travelers and gifts of gratitude
for safe journeys...
Though
Hecate was popular in Greco-Roman culture, she actually originated in Egypt as
the Crone Goddess Hekat, an amalgam of the seven obstetrical Hathors who daily
delivered the newborn sun....
"She was sometimes
perceived as the Crone form of the Cat Goddess Bast, whose priestesses were
also midwives and to whom black cats were sacred. Hence, the still
recognizably familiar 'familiar' of the witch."
Another
of the Church's favorite witch-queens was Proserpina, the Latin form of
Etruscan Persipnei and Greek Persephone. Classical mythology confused her with
Kore, the springtime Virgin, because the trinity of Kore-Demeter-Persephone was
actually cyclic. In the reworked myth, Persephone was the maiden abducted by
the underworld god (Hades or Pluto) and unwillingly made Queen of the
Underworld and forced to live underground during each winter season, when her
mother Demeter grieved for her and refused to let the earth bear fruit or
greenery until her daughter’s return in spring....
Gnostics
taught that newly dead souls would meet Persephone (or Proserpina) in the
underworld as soon as they crossed the River Styx. She would teach them the
"words of power" and magic rituals that they would need to insure a
comfortable afterlife. Knowledge of these matters was a primary purpose of
Gnostic initiation, even among Christian Gnostics, whose ideas were declared
heretical during the fifth century. Nevertheless, Gnostic traditions continued
to influence ordinary folk in secret for at least a thousand years more.
Lilith:
Queen of Witches
The
Semitic version of the Queen of Witches was Lilith or Lilit, known
in apocryphal writings as the first wife of Adam. It was said that she
abandoned Adam because he was too bossy and too crude in his sexual techniques.
She defied God and sneered at the angels that God sent to retrieve her. She
went away to the Red Sea and found more compatible male consorts, by whom she
conceived thousands of children. This detail identifies her as one of the
primary Earth Mother figures, who possessed the title of Mother of All Living,
later transferred to Eve.
"Lilith
[was] one of the primary Earth Mother figures, who possessed the title of
Mother of All Living, later transferred to Eve."
The name of Lilith first
appears on a 4,000-year-old tablet from Ur containing the "Sumerian
version of the Gilgamesh epic" called "Gilgamesh and the
Huluppu-Tree." She was known in Sumeria and Babylon as Belit-Ili, the Lily
Goddess.... Such she-demons were also called Night-Hags or Night-Mares, recalling
the black, mare-headed form of Demeter/Persephone as Crone (Demeter Chthonia,
"Underground Demeter").
In
northern Europe, the Night-Hags were witches known as Volvas, who could
shape-shift themselves into the form of mares between sunset and dawn. Lilith's
constellation of myths gave rise to Christianity’s crudest notions about
witches, not only their shape-shifting abilities and their animal familiars but
also their occult power over men's genitals, their alleged sexual insatiability
and their magical induction in humans of impotence or sexual enslavement. Such
fears lay at the root of the witch-hunting mania that took over Europe in the
12th and 13th centuries, and still lurk behind many forms of male violence
against women.
"Lilith's myths gave
rise to Christianity's crudest notions about witches, not only their
shape-shifting abilities and their animal familiars but also their occult power
over men's genitals."
Lilith's
sacred totem was the owl, the Wise Bird of the Crone, which explains why owls
still appear in Halloween symbolism.... The idea of the Crone Goddess underlies
all such Halloween symbols as the wise owl, the black cat, the ancestral ghost,
a glowing skull-lantern, the mask and costume, the gifts of food to children,
the sacred fires and the harvest feast. Perhaps the most important symbol was
the cauldron: a divine vessel, forever churning forth temporary life forms and
then reabsorbing them into its eternal stew....
The
Cauldron and the Soul
Shakespeare's Macbeth shows the three Weird
Sisters dancing around their sacred cauldron, singing "Round About the
Cauldron Go." They are none other than the old Saxon Triple-Goddess Wyrd,
whose name means "Fate" and who took all creatures into her fatal cauldron
to bring them forth again in new forms. That she was the death-bringing and
life-giving spirit of the earth is indisputable. Some form of the Cauldron
seems to have accompanied most of mythology’s Crone figures.
"The cauldron stood
for birth, nurture, destruction and death, cyclic redistribution going on
forever on a global scale, including everything from bacteria to the largest
organisms."
It was
quite a different concept from the Judeo-Christian one. The cauldron symbolized
the idea that just as thought is inseparable from brain, so spirit is
inseparable from body; the one is a function of the other. Native American
cultures, for example, viewed the whole environment of earth, air, waters,
plants and animals as sacred, because it was all part of their totemic
ancestor-worship. The spirits of all clan members became part of the
environment, just as the spirits of animals and plants that were eaten became
part of the eater. So in a spiritual sense as much as in a material one, there
was constant interchange between self and environment. Gods, ancestors,
saviors, animal spirits and living humans all were part of the same mix. Hidden
in this concept lie the familiar superstitions that claim gods or devils can
take human form and vice versa, or that humans can be made into saints or
demigods simply by the use of human words and magical formulae....
The
ancient view was somewhat more eco-logical, more egalitarian and certainly more
compatible with modern knowledge of natural processes. In the Crone's cauldron,
"soul" becomes synonymous with "life force," characteristic
of all organisms rather than the exclusive property of humans. Matter was one
with its creatress and linguistic derivative, Mater, Mother, the material of
everything. Mother love, which the Hindus called karuna, was the basis of all
feeling and morality....
If this
ancient view had stayed with us, instead of being condemned and obliterated by
patriarchal religion, we might have very different attitudes toward death and
dying, body and spirit, self and other, even good and evil. Since religion is,
in large part, humanity’s effort to deal with the inevitability of death, the
philosophical implications of this change were enormous. Perhaps the earlier
views were more sensible after all.
"What would churches
be today, if they had not so profitably driven the public mule with the carrot
of heaven and the stick of hell?"
What
would churches be today, if they had not so profitably driven the public mule
with the carrot of heaven and the stick of hell? Freed from its collective
dream/nightmare of both carrot and stick, the human creature might have gone in
different directions and understood Halloween, the Season of the Crone, in
entirely different ways. The Crone reminds us that religion-induced fear of
death wastes our powers, while an honest acknowledgement that life must end may
be the best incentive to true enjoyment of being alive.
Excerpted
from Man Made God
For
further information and citations, see Man Made God by Barbara G. Walker, author of The
Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets.
From Stellar House Publishing @ http://www.stellarhousepublishing.com/halloween.html
For more information about Wiccan beliefs see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/wicca
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