A tale of mistaken identities, cultural erasure, and how Halloween became a misunderstood mirror.

During the 1980s and 90s, America saw a wave of moral panic as Halloween was wrongly branded “Satan’s birthday” by evangelical figures. This Satanic Panic coincided with fear-mongering propaganda like the film Hell’s Bells that said rock music was a tool of the devil and was further inflamed by urban legends about razor blades in candy and poisoned treats. Law enforcement held seminars for teachers to educate them about the threat of Satanic cults and Christian families all over America insisted Dungeons & Dragons lead to devil worship. Despite widespread belief, there is no statistical evidence supporting these fears.  While there may be cases of Satanic ritual abuse, nearly all of them appeared on further scrutiny to be hysteria, false memory, and popular panic.  The myth of Halloween as a night of ritual evil was born from projection, not history.  And they started a long with Halloween's sinister tone coming from Mischief Night and Devi's Night a long with the Hollywood blockbusters Rosemary's Baby and the Exorcist vastly contributed to the plausibility that there were active Satanic cults in every community involved in child sacrifice in Satanic rites for immortality.

Except there is no evidence to that end.

Elizabeth Loftus's TED Talk, the Fiction of Memory: How Reliable is your Memory👈, discusses some of these false memory accusations.

The 1992 FBI Investigator's Guide to Allegations of  “Ritual Child Abuse" 👈contains specific instructions to investigators onceit was understood this was an instance of popular hysteria.

As Christianity spread into Celtic lands, Church authorities strategically overlaid Samhain traditions with Christian holy days. Over time, the ancient agricultural and ancestral rites of Samhain were reshaped into sanctioned forms of prayer, almsgiving, and mass. This process reached its apex with the creation of the Allhallowtide Triduum—a three-day Christian observance spanning October 31 to November 2:

• October 31 – All Hallows’ Eve (Halloween): A vigil before the feast of All Saints, this was when the faithful would go souling—offering prayers for the dead in exchange for cakes or alms. Alms were also gathered to support the poor and clergy for the next day’s feast.

• November 1 – All Saints’ Day (All Hallows): A solemn feast commemorating all Christian saints and martyrs, especially those lacking a designated feast day. It emphasized the victory of the sanctified dead.

• November 2 – All Souls’ Day: Dedicated to prayer for souls in purgatory—those not damned, but not yet in heaven. Church tradition held that offerings and prayers made on this day could hasten their ascent.

This structure started in 998 CE (say it “C-E"; it means “Common Era") when Abbot Odilo of Cluny (say it “Cloon-ee"; a big monastery leader in France) made November 2 a special day to remember all souls who had died. It quickly spread across Benedictine monasteries (say it “Ben-uh-dik-teen"; these are religious communities that follow Saint Benedict's rules) and the wider Church. This mixed with older customs like 'guising (wearing costumes to disguise yourself, blend in, or scare away supernatural creatures, beings, and departed spirits) and ancestor veneration (honoring family members who died), especially in places like the British Isles where Celtic folk religion (old nature-based religion) survived best. It survived the most in Ireland, where many Celts fled after the Romans wiped out (killed off) the Druids (Celtic religious leaders) in England.

When the Roman Catholic Church moved All Saints’ Day from May 1 (which was called Beltane, say it “BYAL-tin-eh" like meh, a spring festival) to the fall, they did this to make it easier to feed the many pilgrims (traveling religious visitors) who came to Rome. They also wanted to layer their festival called Allhallowtide (the season of honoring saints and souls) over older Celtic traditions to help convert the last pagans (people who practiced old folk religions).

Ironically, by doing this, the Church kept the seasonal feelings and emotional power of Samhain (say it “SOW-in"; an old Celtic festival marking the start of winter) but changed the focus to the Christian afterlife (life after death in Heaven or Hell).

As the centuries went on, especially during the Counter-Reformation (a time when the Catholic Church fought back against Protestant changes) and witch trials, even harmless folk practices like herbalism (using plants for healing) and Christian mystical symbols like the pentagram (a five-pointed star) were called proof of devil worship.

At first, this was just a cultural change, but it turned into repression (unfair control and punishment). Tools that once taught balance, like the pentacle (a five-pointed star with a circle, representing Christ’s five wounds and the five virtues of knights), and its upside-down form (pentagram), had been Christian symbols for a long time. The inverted or reversed five-pointed star (pentagram) also stood for the Star of Bethlehem (the star that led people to baby Jesus), the Immaculate Conception (Mary being free of original sin), and the Virgin Birth (Jesus being born from Mary without a human father).  It was a symbol for the divinity of Christ, part of the Holy Trinity. 

After the Medieval Period (Middle Ages), people started to wrongly think both the upright pentacle and the downward pentagram were signs of Satan (the devil). Christianization (turning something Christian) had turned into demonization (making something seem evil).  We'll explore how that happened here in a moment (read on to learn more).  

Sites like Tara, Tlachtga (say it ‘TLAKH-guh’ or ‘CLACK-ta'), and Oweynagat (say it ‘OH-en-na-got’) hold deep cultural memory as places where Halloween survived and changed over time. But the true ritual beginning is at Magh Slécht (say it ‘MAH SHLEKHT’) in County Cavan. There, the Killycluggin Stone — an idol to Crom Cruach (say it ‘KRUM CROO-akh’) — stood at the center of pre-Christian Samhain (say it ‘SOW-in’) worship.

According to the Annals of the Four Masters (a very old pseudo/false history book from Ireland from which actual history can be identified), St. Patrick knocked down this idol during his mission to Christianize (turn people Christian) Ireland. This isn’t just a legend — pieces of the broken La Tène-style (say it ‘LAH TEN’; a type of ancient Celtic art) stone still exist and are shown in the Cavan County Museum.

Unlike other places, Killycluggin has archaeological (say it ‘AR-kee-oh-LOJ-ih-kal’; about studying old objects and ruins), annalistic (say it ‘AN-uh-LISS-tik’; from historical records), and mythic (legend) proof of Samhain rituals with votive offerings (say it ‘VOH-tiv’; gifts given to gods or spirits), including burnt cattle offerings. This makes it a strong candidate for Halloween’s true origin site.

The central location at Killycluggin suggests this was a place where people honored Crom to bring big harvests and healthy animals for the next year. It was likely a huge meet-up where Celtic villages gathered to butcher cattle for winter, light a giant bonfire, and sacrifice cattle (there is no evidence of human sacrifice there).

Claims about human sacrifice came from Romans who wanted to conquer Hibernia (the Roman name for Ireland) to get tin and good grazing land. They spread lies to make the Celtic Druids (say it ‘DROO-ids’; spiritual leaders) look bad. Later, Roman Catholic Christian writers also spoke against pagans (say it ‘PAY-guns’; people who followed old nature religions) and their folk traditions.

At these gatherings, people would sweep their houses from back to front, leave out food and drink for visiting dead relatives, open windows, and put out fires to welcome them. After the party, everyone would relight their hearth fires (home fireplaces) with flames from the big community bonfire to start the new season together.

Éliphas Lévi’s 19th-century depiction of the pentagram and the Egyptian Goat of Mendes ended up smearing the symbol.  The Goat of Mendes had been popularized prior to his writing by Renaissance Hermeticists.  

The Renaissance, which took place in Italy with a Northern Renaissance or flourishing based in the Netherlands (also known as the Dutch nor Northern Renaissance), was the cultural rebirth of literacy, learning, philosophy, and art after the Medieval Period.  The Medieval Period, or alternately the Middle Ages, was the time period after Rome's two centuries long decline concluded in 476 CE/AD when the German Catholic Convert General Odoacer ransacked Rome through the High Middle Ages where castles and knights in shining armor existed into the Crusades.  

During the first part of the Middle Ages, which is known as the Dark Ages or Early Middle Ages, when people forgot how to read and write and barely eked out an existence farming with all production for subsistence (year to year with no surplus or extras to trade and no profit incentive, as any surplus went to church tithe or land use fee in exchange for a use right to farm a section of the lord or church manor's land).  The common people of Europe who did the producing, harassed by aspiring warriors as would-be monarchs expanding their kingdoms through violence and barbarian or savage pagan tribes who lived in forests sought refuge in the Church manors, monasteries (where monks train), and convents (where nuns train) and noble's lands and agreed to work them in exchange for a hereditary right to farm a section of land owned by the church or the lord.  

The abbot (top monk) and abbesses of these Church manors served a similar role to the greater and lesser lords of the nobility or aristocracy (those with bloodlines with lands and titles related to the royal family, believed to be put in power by God) and of the gentry (the lesser lords without hereditary bloodlines connecting them to the nobility but due to deeds granted lands and titles) for other serfs across Europe.  

Thus, the church gradually replaced the super-structure of the Roman Empire socially, economically, and politically.   It did so first economically  in manorialism or the economic system during the Middle Ages which is correctly called the Age of Faith.  

Peasants were illiterate and depended upon abotts and abbesses for all religious or secular education, and barely eked out an existence farming church manor lands for the support of the church, just like was the case on those living on greater or lesser lords' lands.  

Serfs and their children were legally bound to the church manor or lord's manor on which they were born and weren't allowed to ever leave without permission of its abbot, abess, or Lord.  And because Europeans did not yet widely use domestic animals to farm, human serfs were the domestic animal upon which the wealth of kingdoms and the Church was built.  

During the early Renaissance, the Great Mortality (anachronistically referred to as the Black Death) wiped out 3 in 4 people in some parts of Europe but 1 in 3 people across the continent and was likely a series of pandemics (and only in some places the bubonic plague associated with it) turned serfs into peasants who could now negotiate labor contracts with landlords due to the shortage of labor caused by the Great Mortality and the development of free laborers who could now leave their manors.  

But the need of the Church manors and feudal manors for serf or free peasant labor would soon be erased and made obsolete by the horse shoe, tandem harness, and new crop rotation methods using legumes (nitrogen-fixers like peas and beans that put nitrogen back into the soil) from the Netherlands, much like McCormick's mechanical harvesters made sharecroppers obsolete in the American South, leading to the Great Migration and Exodusters of the American early 20th Century (early 1900s).  That led to a series of laws across Europe called the Enclosure Movement where landlords trespassed peasants from lands they had legal hereditary title to farm communally (but did not own, a legal use right), and left them proletarianized (turned into landless laborers) to become wage laborers and hundreds of peasant rebellions across Europe.  

Simultaneously, wooden pallisaded (fence/fortification) open air markets called burghs emerged outside castles after they had been built due to improvements in siege technology like the catapult and trebuchet.   Burgesses or burghers in England (also burroughs in England) and Germany, and bourgeoisie in bourgs in France became wealthy merchants through trade, often of trade goods from China through the Great Silk Road, which would lead to the in-between stage of the economic manorial system and political feudal system and modern market economies called mercantilism that drove the Age of Exploration and early Age of Empire/Imperialism after the Renaissance.    

And after Charlemagne or Charles I attempted to restore the Western Roman (Catholic) Empire ruling from Achen, Germany, and the Bishop of Rome and St. Peter's successor the Pope crowned him king, leading to a practice called Investiture, it gave secular authority to the Pope and made the Church politically powerful and made it a kind of super-state above all the many dozens of changing kingdoms across Europe.  

Those vents not only led to the growth in secular power of the Roman Catholic Church centered on Charles I's Achen, Germany, and the Vatican in Rome, Italy, under the Pope's authority, but also led to religious wars that would ironically cause a flowering of learning across the continent.  Charlegmagne's Holy Roman Empire and the establishment of the Church as an empire under him led to the Crusades (there were four major crusades but around 200 in total) or holy wars against the Islamic (Muslim) Caliphate for control of Jerusalem and sites sacred to Jews and Christians there and to protect pilgrims on pilgrimages to these sacred sites.   

But those crusading Roman Catholic knights returned to Europe, bringing with them books and scrolls which were studied by the scholars, nobles, intellectuals, and monks, and reignited literacy and collective learning which had stalled and regressed during the Middle Ages.   And the combined knowledge of ancient Egypt, Sumeria, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, Greece, and Rome, combined first by Alexander the Great in Alexandria, Egypt and the libraries he built, but then formalized by the Greek Aristotle in his Lyceum (an early college), but then lost to Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire there had been preserved by Arab Muslim scholars during Islam's Golden Age who improved the mathematics, astronomy, and medical knowledge left by Alexander and then the Romans.   It was also preserved by Irish monks in Ireland.   

But in their rediscovery of the secret or mystery religions and sacred rites and sacred geometry of ancient Greece and of Rome, the Gnostic Christians, and of ancient Egypt Ma'at worship (which they made Kemetism), as well as first century Greco-Egyptian Hermeticism, they revived a Mendes, Egypt symbol for duality in the Goat of Mendes.  Unfortunately, Elias Lephi in his book called _____, published in ____, in France, falsely associated the Hermetic Goat of Mendes with Satan imagined as a cloven hooved goat which had percolated across the Medieval Period.

Where he did not alone invent the Satan as goat imagery, his misassociation of the Goat of Mendes with proof of Satan-as-goat worship upended centuries of the predominant symbol of Christians being a five-pointed star as Satanic which had previously only been associated with holiness, likely too because medieval occultists and alchemists encountered the symbolic use of the same symbol to represent balance in the five Hermetic elements: earth, air, fire, water, and spirit or ether.   

This medieval invention of Satan as Baphomet appears nowhere in the Holy Bible but was a monastic Christian theological construction or concoction based upon Leviticus scriptures forbidding Jews from performing sacrifices in purification rituals to goat gods in the desert, and actually was sanctioning against blood rituals and animal sacrifice.   In those passages, a scapegoat is sent into the wilderness as sacrifice to Azazel, an apparent wilderness spirit, god or demon worshipped by biblical Canaanites.  That image of the devil from a word that simply began as a reference to Islamic idol worshippers was also interpreted from Jesus's imagery in Matthew of the sheep and the goats (representing the immoral, unrighteous). And by the time this image of Satan existed, it was seemingly confirmed through the coerced confessions of Knights Templar in the Friday, October 13, 1307, French Inquisition of Phillip the IV or Fair of France against them in which torturers insisted the tortured they must admit they worshipped a goat idol called Baphomet.  Except there's literally zero proof that anyone ever worshipped such a goat god except for some of the ancient Israelites in Leviticus, and it was a false association with the Goat of Mendes, an Egyptian God worshipped in Mendes for duality, popularized during the Renaissance by Rosicrucians and Renaissance Hermetics.  

Baphoment which had originally been a reference to the prophet Mohammad and to his followers as Muslims as idolators, those who worshipped idols or icons of false gods and committed sacrifice to them (as both Jews did in ritual sacrifice of the paschal lamb or scapegoat, and Muslims did as part of their Qurbani or Udhiyah remembrance of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son to show his obedience to God during Eid al-Adha; and the meat was distributed under both religions to needy families).

But as scholars discovered the secret mystery religions of Greece and Rome, of the Gnostic Christians and their doctrines, and of first century Comman Era Greco-Egyptian Hermeticism, they revived the symbol during the Renaissance as a symbol for duality, a Western Civilization equivalent of the Eastern yin and yang) as originally meant to symbolize duality: material and spiritual, male and female.

Levi made the mistake of equating the goat of Baphomet in his book with the Goat of Mendes, and it stuck, leading the pentacle which had taught Medieval Christians the virtues of chivalry and the five wounds of Christ in the legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to boys to be replaced with the crucifix.  It caused the upright five pointed star (pentacle), long a well understood symbol for Christ's sacrifice on the cross, to be associated with Satanism, falsely.  

And it led the reverse or inverted five pointed star (the pentagram,with the point facing down, long a symbol for the virgin birth of the son of God who died for our sins and for his divinity, to likewise be associated with Satanism.  

Scholarly mistakes can lead to rumors that do real lasting damage—for centuries, and lead to actual mass hysteric murder it turns out.   

However, through the lens of the Counter-Reformation’s obsession with heresy, this image was vilified. By the 20th century, Hollywood films like “The Exorcist" and “ Rosemary’s Baby" repackaged Christian mysticism as Satanic horror, permanently miscasting one of Christianity’s most symbolic tools of spiritual balance and self-discipline.

Meanwhile, 19th-century America saw the rise of Spiritualism. Born out of intense grief during a time when nearly half of all children died before adulthood, and hundreds of thousands perished in the Civil War, Spiritualism became a way for both Protestants and Catholics to cope with uncertainty about their loved ones' fates. Traditional religions offered little comfort in the face of mass suffering and unanswered prayer. The Fox Sisters, founders of the movement, claimed to communicate with the dead through spirit raps. “ Spiritualism is the natural religion of sorrow," one practitioner said. 

Mary Todd Lincoln held séances in the White House after the death of her son Willie. William Mumler took spirit photographs for grieving families. Even as Harry Houdini would later expose the frauds, millions found solace in the belief that loved ones could still reach out.

By the mid-20th century, however, as scientific rationalism grew and superstition was increasingly mocked or feared, spiritualism faded—only to re-emerge in distorted form. Christian fundamentalists repackaged the mystical as demonic, films sensationalized it, and Halloween’s creative, communal rituals were replaced by store-bought costumes and plastic lawn décor. We traded grief ritual for profit, community for isolation.

Halloween is a night of masks, but behind the mask is memory—of ancestors, of joy, of sorrow. By remembering the forgotten stories—of the Killycluggin Stone, of spiritualism’s comfort, of the symbols we lost—we can reclaim Halloween not just as entertainment, but as sacred. A night where Americans of every background can participate in something ancient, joyful, and shared: community parades, costume-making, pumpkin carving, and the sacred bond of collective imagination. Let us rebuild the soul of Halloween, together.