I am always sniffing around for the pagan holdover in the fabric of our monothestic culture.
No greater holdover exists than Halloween. Folded into All Souls Day or All Saints Day, the overtly pagan element of the holiday is evident. Anyone who has gone to work at 7AM knows that the days are growing shorter, darker, colder. Anyone in the North East of North American can see that nature is doing its great slough of vegetation. In heavy wind and soggy rain, leaves tumble down to death.
We are at a threshold where life cascades into death, or at least, to the dormancy of life. And at this time, somewhere in the past, certain cultures saw in this death in nature a metaphor for the greater cycles of human life and death. So this holiday of Halloween, or the Day of the Dead, was created in part to fulfill a great need: the desire to have a nexus between life and death. A place where the dead communicate with the living.
The costumes and trick-or-treating are really just a superficial symbols for the expression of these greater archetypes. Things die. But death also brings forth new life. And this is a great cycle that never ends
There is something essentially pagan about Sukkot. The season is turning from summer to fall; leaves are stirring; there is the smell of overripe vegetation. Sukkot is a biblical holiday, and was one of the pilgrimage festivals to Jerusalem for the blessing of the new fruits. The historical reason for the holiday was that it symbolized the impermanent structures where the Israelites dwelled during their 40 years wanderings. But really, what we have here is an agricultural holiday given a historical dimension (often done in Judaism, and other traditions).
I like the symbolism of the sukkah. It is not permanent. One must be able to see out of the roof. Often, the thing gets knocked down during autumn storms and one is forced to build it again. Everything in nature is slowly fading away. During the waving of the lulav, one turns to all points of the compass, and up and down, to symbolize that no place is devoid of HaShem.
The two symbols dovetail. Nothing is permanent. Everything is in flux. There is only HaShem. We are part of all this and it is all the same. Earth, sky, water, air. Everything is One.
My first book, Religious Syncretism, gestated for about a decade before it became an active work of research and writing. It was published as a textbook with SCM-Canterbury in 2006.
I had been thinking over the years about the curious customs of pagan origins that continue in our day to day lives. Tossing coins in fountains (a variation of a Celtic practice of tossing coins to the dead in marshes to gain their favor). Knocking on wood (again, another Celtic practice, done to stir up the soul in a tree for protection). Our daily lives, and especially our monotheistic holidays, are studded with pagan holdovers. The obvious ones, Christmas trees, Easter eggs, the Sukkah, are only the most evident expression of religious borrowing.
My book shows the pervasiveness of borrowing. It takes examples of hybrid varieties of Islam, Christianity and Judaism to show the fluidity between these religions and so-called paganism. The three great carriers of syncretism in religion are saint veneration, mysticism and folk practice. My book illustrates that all three pervade Judaism, Islam and Christianity, and offer interesting and compelling examples of how the three Abrahamic religions share among one another and paganism.
