The sun deity Beaivi withholds her rays in October, particularly in northern Norway, where in 1674, a beggar named Kirsten Iversdatter was bound to the stake. She had been accused of witchcraft, not just because of her itinerant lifestyle and rumors of promiscuity, but due to the pagan beliefs of the Sámi, the persecuted Indigenous minority of which she was a member. Sixty-five years before, King Christian IV of Denmark — a steadfast Lutheran — had decreed that “Sámi witchcraft should be persecuted without mercy.” In the dwindling autumnal dusk, the immolation of Iversdatter would alight that frigid town.
By a congruence of the calendar, it was on the final day of that month nearly a century and a half before — Halloween of 1517 — when Martin Luther made the protest that marked the symbolic beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Among Lutherans and the Reformed churches, mainline Protestants and evangelicals, that day marks the separation from the papacy, the supposed return to scripture and faith, the rejection of superstition and idolatry. What is officially marked in several German cantons and by dozens of different Protestant denominations as “Reformation Day” often serves as a replacement for Halloween, that holiday irrevocably associated with Celtic and Teutonic paganism. For those believers who recognize October 31 as Reformation Day, Luther’s hammer hitting the wood door of Wittenberg Cathedral marked not just a break with Rome, but the final break with Europe’s pagan past, a victory of Christendom against that which is libeled as dark and demonic, wanton and witchy. In a secular cultural sense, it might be seen as a victory of ethics, rationality, and faith — those qualities which one could argue led directly to the development of capitalism, democracy, and scientific thinking — over the domain of fantasy, emotion, and magic.
But that victory of Protestantism over paganism was anything but total. Centuries before Luther, Europe’s conversion to Christianity was hardly seamless, occurring in fits and starts, even after Emperor Theodosius I made the faith the official one of the Roman Empire in 380. Lithuania, for example, was famously belated in this regard, only becoming officially Christian more than a millennium later, in 1387. Particularly among Renaissance humanists, chief among them the painter Piero di Cosimo, a reverence for the classical pantheon endured.
In 1921, Margaret Murray, an Egyptologist with no particular grounding in early modern history, would even go on to argue in the controversial albeit influential study The Witch Cult in Western Europe that the religious persecution of the 16th and 17th centuries was actually perpetrated to root out practitioners of a continent-wide, crypto-pagan faith dedicated to the worship of a “Horned God” that had secretly endured. Later historians such as Hugh Trevor-Roper and Keith Thomas would dispute much of the evidence that Murray had assembled, but a more charitable interpretation of her work is that it was less incorrect than overstated. A pagan doesn’t need to know that they’re a pagan, one might say — even if their adversary does.
In 1983, for instance, the respected Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, in part drawing upon the massive and until-that-point restricted archives of the Vatican Library, argued that there was a core of truth regarding Murray’s hypothesis in The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Examining the commonalities in beliefs about witchcraft and the Witches’ Sabbath in disparate locations, of these “faint traces of myth,” Ginzburg concludes that they’re the remnants of older traditions that “must have been diffused in an earlier period over a much vaster area.”
Reformation Day continues to mark the erasure of a pagan past that Halloween — which spun out of the Celtic festival of Samhain — embodies. But as the endurance of folk or non-Christian beliefs — whether the rituals of the Sámi or the jocular grin of the jack-o’-lantern — demonstrates, those essential energies of mysticism and magic can thankfully never be fully contained, the great Horned God never totally defeated by organized religion.
