Hiram and Halloween

Halloween is only a few days away and our shops and streets are already overflowing with pumpkins, skulls, skeletons and all manner of ghoulish and morbid displays, often inspired by films, TV series and video games. Why should Freemasons be concerned about these sometimes grotesque and tasteless displays ? Perhaps because of the symbols of death, particularly skulls, which they are accustomed to seeing in many of their rituals and on many of their symbolic objects, and which will inevitably remind them of the figure of Hiram. Is there a connection between Halloween and Hiram ? Is Freemasonry just a perpetual Halloween centred on the figure of Hiram? That's what we're trying to find out here.

The origins of Halloween

As we all know, Halloween is a syncretic festival born out of the encounter between Christianity and ancient European traditions, especially Celtic ones. It has its origins in the Celtic festival known as Samain in Gaelic and Samonios in Gallic. Celebrated at the beginning of November, it marked the end of the year and was, among other things, a harvest festival. This aspect of Samain is linked to the harvest festivals of the Germanic world, which eventually centred around St Martin's Day (10 November).

But Samain also had a mythological dimension : it represented a kind of inter-time, a suspension of time between the year that was ending and the year that was beginning, and this kind of temporal fissure created a porosity between the world of the living and the Other World, called Sidh in Irish. The Sidh is not really comparable to a simple realm of the dead, but rather a parallel reality populated by gods, mysterious beings and, incidentally, the dead. During the festival of Samain, a moment of suspended time, the inhabitants of the Sidh could mingle with humans and, on rare occasions, certain mortals could enter the Other World.



Druids

The Christianisation of Samain, transformed into All Hallows Eve (which later became Halloween) and followed by the Feast of the Dead (1 and 2 November respectively), came about only under the pontificate of Pope Gregory IV, who reigned from 827 to 844. Prior to this, there had been a general feast of the martyrs, which had been celebrated on 13 May since 613, to cover the Roman feast of Lemuria. In fact, the Roman religion dedicated the days from 9 to 14 May to the Lemurs, the damned souls : fava beans were offered to them to appease them and prevent them from returning to haunt the world of the living.

The same approach led to the choice of 1 November, this time to neutralise the feast of Samain. November 1 thus became the feast of all the saints, not just the martyrs, and November 2 was dedicated to all the dead, from whom it was to be feared that they would return to haunt the world of the living, since the saints, supposedly at rest in God, posed no threat.

Popular traditions, especially in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, retained elements of the original festival in disguise. In the 19th century, the custom arose of (originally poor) children going from house to house to receive cakes in exchange for prayers. This practice was a reminder that Samain was a celebration of a bountiful harvest, but also that food offerings could ward off evil spirits.

Halloween then spread to America, largely thanks to the massive Irish immigration that followed the Great Famine of 1845. The current form of Halloween, which is essentially commercial, only really developed from the 1930s onwards, and the search for candy became the playful 'trick or treat', while the reference to the other world was reduced to a parade of vampires, werewolves, skeletons, zombies and other frightening figures drawn more from the world of cinema than from Celtic mythology or ancient European beliefs.

And it wasn't until the 1990s that Halloween made its way to continental Europe and into the supermarkets. While this move was driven primarily by commercial imperatives, it also corresponded with the spread of the American culture we all know from films and TV series. At a deeper level, the movement may have responded to a widespread need for the miraculous in a decidedly secular world that has largely abandoned any reference to an ‘other world’.

The meaning of Halloween

A composite festival born of the meeting of different cultures and absorbed by consumer society, Halloween cannot be described in simple terms. Historically, it is the Christianisation of a pagan festival. Originally a celebration of the end of the year and the harvest, with an opening onto the other world, the emphasis is now on the dead: officially, we pray for the dead, but the old idea that we should make offerings to them so that they don't come back to haunt us certainly persists. A mixture of official Christian doctrine and superstitious practices, the last vestiges of a forgotten paganism, Halloween has become a form of popular religiosity and folklore in the British Isles. It's a difficult festival to pin down, because it brings together two completely different worldviews : a cyclical and naturalistic vision, of pagan origin, which simply describes the seasonal rhythm of the year and evokes the other world as a parallel reality that is not intended to frighten or engender guilt ; and a historical vision, of Judeo-Christian origin, which describes the afterlife as a place to which all humans inexorably tend, and often as a place of punishment, and above all suggests that the darkest souls still haunt this world.



Halloween

Transplanted to the United States by Irish immigrants, Halloween lost its serene and happy side and retained only its morbid aspect. From then on, Halloween imagery drew exclusively on the macabre and morbid, sometimes with a touch of carnival humour, as if making fun of death made it less frightening. Culturally, Anglo-Saxon literature, with its love of mystery and the supernatural since the Romantic period, helped to shape this imagery, which was then passed on by cinema and the counterculture of the 1970s.

So is Halloween just a way of expressing the fear of death in a largely secular Western civilisation ? Is it just a ridiculous attempt to exorcise fears that we no longer dare to face? We have every right to think so.

What about Hiram?

Does the legend of Hiram, the central myth of Freemasonry, have anything to do with Halloween ? At first glance, we can see that certain images of death are shared between the legend of Hiram and the celebration of Halloween, at least in its current form, as the skull and the colour black. The story of Hiram's death would fit in well with the imagery of Halloween, but even more so the story of the discovery and raising of his body : a corpse which, according to the rituals, already stinks, is exhumed, stripped of its shroud and raised by holding it against oneself... Freemasons have become accustomed to the description of this scene, of which they ultimately retain only the symbolic dimension. But if you take the story literally, you'll have to admit that it's quite gruesome, morbid and macabre, in the spirit of today's Halloween.

But these similarities are superficial and, above all, anachronistic. In the eighteenth century, Halloween had not yet taken on its current form, and certainly did not resemble a ghost train. The morbid imagery found in Freemasonry has its roots much further back in Baroque culture's love of Memento Mori, still life paintings with skulls evoking the vanity of all things.



Hiram

Isn't there some other connection between the Masonic Hiram and Halloween, beyond the simple macabre appeareance ? From an anthropological point of view, the legend of Hiram touches on the central question of death, which has preoccupied mankind since the beginning of time. And it is in myths that all cultures have tried to come to terms with the presence of death and the inevitable anxiety it generates. So is the Masonic legend of Hiram just one of the many avatars of myth that seeks to explain itself through the theme of death ? In part, certainly.

But the Hiram myth does not seem to answer the question of death per se. It does not go back to the origins of humanity and is based on a culture (in this case, the Judeo-Christian) that already has a complete myth about death. Freemasonry does not claim to compete with the Christian myth, but it considers the legend of Hiram as an initiatory symbol of a passage to another level of consciousness : in this respect, unlike today's Halloween, the Masonic legend of Hiram is ultimately closer to the original Samain, which also describes, in a way, communication between different levels of reality.