Martin Luther’s Hallowe’en
ALAN MURDIE considers Protestantism’s influence on our modern concepts of ghosts and spirits
On 9 October 2017 BBC News reported the action of an aggrieved Norfolk shopkeeper, Mr Nigel Parrott, 56, of Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, in displaying an anti-ghost walk poster in his store window. His protest arose through being fed up with the inclusion of his ‘Sweet Dreams’ sweetshop in a local ghost walk, on account of Ouija board séances allegedly once held there before Mr Parrott opened his confectionary business. Including a strongly religious message in his notice, he insisted that all “demonic paraphernalia” had been removed and that Jesus was “the only spirit” in his shop and that “Jesus Christ died so we could be free from all other spirits and negativity”. Mr Parrott also refrains from promoting Hallowe’en-themed sweets, concentrating his efforts on Bonfire Night and Remembrance Sunday. A local ghost walk organiser has offered sincere apologies for offence caused. ( BBC News 9 Oct; Yarmouth Mercury, 11 Oct 2017).
I rather admire Mr Parrott in his bold individual assertion of strict traditional Protestantism and his resolute gesture against commercialised spooky culture. Walking the high streets of Britain last autumn, ahead of 31 October, even the most myopic of casual strollers will have noticed numerous shops and businesses awash with a veritable tide of decorative Hallowe’en pumpkins, witches’ hats, cardboard arachnids, plastic skulls and other sundry spooky and ghoulish ornaments displayed as lures for customers. Equally noticeable were people presenting such merchandise in the front windows and porches of their homes. Come Hallowe’en night itself, copying the example in urban areas of the United States, many British towns and cities saw parades of children in fancy dress, their ranks swollen this year by a considerable number of grown adults likewise garbed as witches, ghouls, monsters, and devils from the Pit. With some individuals the degree of fancy dress and personal makeover required to achieve this effect appeared negligible. Yet almost nowhere within this Hallowe’en frenzy was any tribute to the forerunner of Mr Parrott who made it all possible. I refer not to some advertising guru or team of marketing geniuses from the United States, blamed on no evidence by barometer of popular taste Jeremy Clarkson ( Sunday Times, 6 Nov 2017) for piggy-backing on the traditional state-sanctioned anarchy of Bonfire Night, thereby resulting in “two weekends on the trot where nobody gets any sleep”.
Rather the actual originator of Hallowe’en may come as a surprise, particularly to Mr Parrott and a number of other evangelical Christians who like him deplore it. For a significant share of the responsibility for creating the communal modern Hallowe’en festival goes back some 500 years to another religious protest notice, that issued in 1517 by the German monk and theologian Martin Luther (1483-1546). According to popular legend Luther’s nailed his 95 Theses to the Castle church door at Wittenberg; more historical is that on 31 October that year he sent it out to Albert of Brandenburg, the Archbishop of Mainz. From this began the theological fracturing of Christendom that became the Protestant Reformation.
To be fair, this significant 500th anniversary was given some attention by sections of the thinking religious press, history journals and the more highbrow sections of the media, though Luther’s choice of date and involvement with ghost beliefs aroused no great interest. But among many historical consequences still with us today, Luther’s action had profound effects upon how the Western world approaches ghosts and the supernatural in general. In short, Protestantism carved out the cultural space where these ideas now flourish as strongly as ever. Indeed, it seems possible Luther selected Hallowe’en 1517 for maximum impact, the choice of date being a direct and calculated challenge to many Catholic dogmas formulated in the Middle Ages, especially doctrines concerning the fate of the dead and the role of Purgatory, an intermediate afterlife domain that was neither Heaven nor Hell. By the time Luther wrote, the festivals of All Saints’ (1 November) and All Souls’ (2 November) had been going strong for centuries, having begun at Cluny in 991.
For believing Catholics, ghosts represented the spirits of the dead in Purgatory, on a kind of ticket-of-leave or nocturnal-release scheme whereby they might temporarily revisit former homes and friends, often imploring those living to purify them by prayers and masses of expiation for all sins not meriting eternal damnation. Belief that terms in Purgatory could be reduced or avoided led to devotees leaving money to fund masses for their souls after death – effectively one could purchase early release. Some worshippers endowed portions of parish churches and special ecclesiastical buildings known as chantries, where the necessary prayers might be recited. Relics of these are detectable in many places around England, as surviving features in churches or commemorated in road and estate names where worshippers once conversed, prayed and pleaded for the dead. The business of praying could go on for generations – at one religious foundation
Luther’s action had profound effects upon how the Western world approaches ghosts
in Essex, prayers were observed for over a century after the death of the benefactor.
Luther considered all this unbiblical and an excuse for financial exploitation. For Luther there was no halfway house in Purgatory where the dead waited for prayers from the living to release them. The dead either went to Heaven, if they were saved by the grace of Christ, or were consigned to Hell for eternity. Proclaiming sponsored prayers and monetary bequests for remission of sins as superstitious nonsense, Luther declared apparitions as wicked deceits perpetrated by Popish priests or by the Devil himself.
In the lands adopting Protestantism, praying for souls in Purgatory was rejected, shaping the law governing charitable bequests in Reformation England. Legacies for promoting religion were classed as charitable gifts, but any bequest for the saying of Masses for the dead might fall outside legitimate charitable purposes. Grey areas abounded; for example, monuments inscribed ‘pray for the soul of X’ were still the subject of serious litigation into the 1960s (also providing a suitably obscure point to test law students sitting ‘Equity and Trusts’ papers in law exams). The possibility of dead souls returning was also rejected by strict Lutherans.
Nonetheless, the problem remained that ghosts continued to appear to credible witnesses, including faithful Protestants. Ghost experiences provoked ardent disputation between the Catholic and Reformed Churches over the precise nature of these visions. One approach was to treat all sightings with suspicion, as did the Protestant Swiss theologian Ludwig Lavater, author of De Spectris (1570) (translated as “Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nyght”, 1572/1929), who presented many sceptical arguments still ventilated today (misperception, intoxication, mental disturbance etc).
From the later 16th century to the end of the 17th century, Britain produced much book and pamphlet literature focusing on apparitions and their implications, reaching a peak between about 1640 and 1680. Historian John Newton identifies different and complex interpretative strategies in arguments over whether ghosts of the dead might be the mask of devils in disguise, or angels (the latter being a greatly amplified class of entity whom Luther refused to formally venerate). (John Newton, Early Modern Ghosts: Proceedings of the Early Modern Ghosts Conference Held at St John’s College, Durham University 24 March 2001; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 1970). With a perfect piece of English compromise, Daniel Defoe later proposed ghosts might be ‘daimons’, morally neutral spirits, neither good nor evil. However, the interpretation of common folk in Great Britain varied, and with the passage of time Protestant views became less definite. Many late 17th-century cases from England, collected by John Aubrey in 1696, featured apparitions delivering complex verbal messages to percipients, commonly asking for some service to be performed, or some task completed, putting right a wrong committed by the deceased. It was difficult ascribing such positive goals to demonic activity.
The breaking of the Catholic interpretive monopoly concerning the supernatural had two opposite but complimentary effects. Freed from Roman authority, Protestants devised personal paths to salvation from Scripture and enjoyed greater liberty of conscience and thought. All manner of beliefs and ideas blossomed. On the one hand, this stimulated scepticism toward supernatural phenomena (including ultimately religion itself), and on the other encouraged magical beliefs and occult dabbling. A spirit of rational enquiry that formally discarded many specifically Catholic miracles simultaneously boosted an emerging scientific attitude and a belief in witchcraft. As shown by Bob Rickard (see FT357:44-50), both tendencies can be detected amongst founders of the Royal Society who engaged simultaneously in experimentation with occult and mainstream physical sciences. Contrary to popular thinking, witch persecutions were generally not conducted in an atmosphere of emotional frenzy. Trials could be ponderous in the extreme; and providing the intellectual climate for witch hunting were the scholars and rationalists: “With few exceptions the authors of treatises advocating witch hunts were cultivated, erudite and eminently respected.” (See Henry More (1614–1687), Tercentenary Studies with a biography and bibliography, 1989, edited by Robert Crocker).
The Reformation led to a declining acceptance of the physicality of apparitions and miracles. Catholic nations still venerated the relics of dead saints as being imbued with miraculous and curative properties (e.g. St Januarius’s blood at Naples and the Turin Shroud). In Orthodox lands the re-animated dead returned as vampires. But in Protestant states alleged post-mortem manifestations became ethereal and subjective. At the Reformation Protestants also lost many traditional ritual defensive methods against the malevolent supernatural, such as exorcism, holy water and crucifixes, all seen as Popish superstitions.
Yet neither the thirst for the supernatural, nor fear of it, disappeared. The removal of the Catholic rites around All Hallows’ and All Souls’ Day arguably left a spiritual vacuum in which all manner of alternative customs could thrive. Today, no matter how a minority of strict evangelical Christians may deplore Hallowe’en as an invitation to the diabolic, its very celebration reflects just how effective Protestantism has been in banishing Catholic seasonal ritual from the Anglo-Saxon world. As Professor Ronald Hutton states: “If so many of those traditions now appear to be divorced from Christianity, this is precisely because of the success of early reformers in driving them out of the churches and away from the clerics” (See Stations of the Sun: A History
of the Ritual Year in Britain, 1993.) However, whilst there is no doubting Luther’s influence on thinking about ghosts, one cannot ascribe all Hallowe’en customs, rituals and carry-ons in the centuries that followed, including the secularised and commercialised festivals of today, to the impact of the Reformation. After Protestants condemned the supernatural and witches and spooks as either Popish frauds or the Devil, how did it all come back into Hallowe’en? After all, people do not take to the streets dressed as witches and devils out of respect for Protestant theology.
The development of manifold customs at Hallowe’en was an issue explored on 8 November 2017 at the annual Katherine Briggs Lecture held by the Folklore Society at the Warburg Institute, London, with Professor Nick Groom of Exeter University addressing the theme, “Hallowe’en and Valentine: The Culture of Saints’ Days in the English-Speaking World”. His interesting review exposed post-Reformation Hallowe’en customs as amazingly diverse, including fooling, begging, games, mischief, divination for finding one’s future spouse, and a strong early 18th century passion for cracking and consuming nuts. Little of the malign supernatural or sombre commemoration of the dead is identifiable in surviving texts. The change in perceptions appears driven in 1785 by Scottish poet Robert Burns, with his poem Hallowe’en. Declared “incomprehensible without Burns’s footnotes, the first of these averring Hallowe’en, “to be a night when witches, devils, and other mischief-making beings are abroad on their baleful midnight errands; particularly those aerial people the fairies, are said on that night to hold a grand anniversary”. Given wide circulation, thereafter Hallowe’en tradition both narrows and re-invigorates itself, gathering up elements from around the UK, Ireland and later the USA. The sometimes rowdy, burlesque and prankish elements which accompany Hallowe’en today are no modern invention.
Perhaps this is wholly appropriate, since nuisance and physical disturbance was one thing Luther admitted regarding ghost reports. His one major concession to the material supernatural was the existence of invisible, noisy, object-flinging entities, being the first writer to employ the term
poltergeist for these largely domestic persecutions (thanks to Guy Lyon Playfair for bringing this to my attention). Luther continued a Teutonic fashion for coining new terms for such phenomena, such as
klopfgeist (rapping spirit) or labelling them as goblins e.g. ‘Kobold’, with etymological connections with the Gothic kubawalds and kubahulths and poltermannchen (literally ‘little noisy man’). (Annekatrin Puhle (1999), ‘Apparitions and Poltergeist Incidents in Germany between 1700 and 1900’ in Journal of the SPR vol.63, no.857; Dagmar Linhart’s Haus-geister in
Franken (‘Domestic spirits in Franken’), 1995). See also FT293:38-41.
Furthermore, the Catholic doctrine of ghosts being spirits has never disappeared, despite decades of psychical research (e.g. the 1898 case at Preston Manor, Sussex (see Haunted
Brighton, 2006, by Alan Murdie, the Borley books of Harry Price and Shane Leslie’s Ghost Book, 1955). If anything, this view is on the ascendant once more amongst amateur ghost hunters, mixing with spiritualist and New Age ideas, though with little regard to the welfare of the souls of the departed (a point made by Catholic writer Ian Wilson in In Search
of Ghosts, 1995). Previously noted in earlier columns, physical manifestations attributed to the dead seem to be increasing.
A good example is the report in September 2017 from Mr Paul Toole, site manager and tour guide at a former prison at Shepton Mallet, Somerset. Mr Toole believes he was burned by a ghost whilst standing in a cell at the former category C prison, telling the story of Private Lee Davis, a US serviceman executed at the jail in 1943. Without warning he felt a sharp pain in his left hand and saw “out of nowhere” a red mark like a cigarette burn on his skin. His immediate reaction was, “Blimey, that looks rather raw”. Apparently, formerly sceptical about ghosts, Mr Toole stated, “I have seen and witnessed truly terrifying things when taking people around on tours in the daytime.”
The fiery hand of a soul in torment? Perhaps, although Lee Davis was hanged rather than frying in the electric chair. It is not the first occasion a former institution for unfortunate inmates at Shepton Mallet has been reported as haunted; the old workhouse in town was claimed as haunted back in 2005 ( Western Daily Press, 24 Jan 2005). But it may be noted that just one week after his mysterious injury, Mr Toole – seemingly recovered from any trauma – was promoting commercial ghost tours inside the building on behalf of Jailhouse Tours. He told the Bristol Post: “This is a once-in-alifetime experience for people who want to spend a night in prison” and “have the fright of their lives”. Those brave enough to take up the offer would receive the “full prisoner experience including bland porridge for dinner and breakfast, and a sleepover locked in their very own cell”. Mr Toole stated: “From my experiences, I’m fully confident that there are spirits of former prisoners who were executed here, so this overnight tour is definitely not one for the faint-hearted.” By mid-October parties of up to 30 ghost hunters were attending. ( Bristol Post, 12+20 Sept, 13 Oct; Sun, 24 Sept 2005).
It will be interesting to watch developments, and if his tour goes the way of those at the Covenanter’s Prison in Greyfriars Kirkyard, Scotland, where over-excited participants complained of physical touches, scratches and bruises attributed to an aggressive poltergeist. This was despite the area having no record of any haunting, save in children’s folklore, until a ghost walk began in the 1990s (see The Ghost that Haunted Itself, 2001, by Jan-Andrew Henderson; Haunted
Edinburgh, 2008, by Alan Murdie). Thus, physically troublesome ghosts remain a social reality, continuing to fascinate. Indeed, an academic nod of approval for further study was reflected in the selection by the Folklore Society of ‘Gef’! The Strange Tale of an ExtraSpecial Talking Mongoose by Chris Josiffe (reviewed FT356:59), a book examining the most bizarre poltergeist of the 20th century, as winner of this year’s Katherine Briggs book prize. Of course, that is presuming that ‘Gef’ was a poltergeist, not a priest or devil in disguise…