Why I Do This

England's Nimrud

ISIS use power tools to destroy 3000 year old monuments before
blowing the entire site up.

*Written back in April on a previous blog. Still relevant today.*

Today is a sad day for world history as it appears that ISIS have attacked and destroyed the ancient city of Nimrud in an act of pure religious fanaticism. In videos shown across the world, images showed Islamists attacking the Assyrian city ruins which still contained priceless artifacts, some of which were over 3000 years old. Those taking part are apparently inspired by their prophet Mohammed's violent behavior as documented in the Quran, in tales where he is said to have torn down pagan idols in Mecca "with his bare hands". (I know right, this guy must have been strong, huh!)

The issue seems to be more widespread than just ISIS though, so this isn't an issue of just one group of extremists. It seems that there is an inherent issue within Islam over protection of historically important sites. In Saudi Arabia for example the Government there has completely turned a blind eye to even Mecca's heritage, with one Time Magazine article saying as much as 98% of the heritage sites there have been bulldozed for modern development. 

There were even calls last month from ISIS and extremist Islamic preachers to destroy what is left of the Sphinx and the pyramids in Giza. Of course this wouldn't be the first time as the nose of the Sphinx and many statues across Palestine and Turkey were defaced (quite literally) by religious nutters throughout history. They weren't just Muslim though, as Iconoclasm has been used quite extensively across history as a method of erasing the cultural stamp of a previous civilization when conquering land or subjugating a group of people.

Whilst the practice has been used since the dawn of time, the main offenders across history have tended to be those from an Abrahamic religious persuasion, and although we might think of these acts as occurring in exotic locations in the middle-east or on some isolated Mediterranean island, it may shock some to hear that similar practices happened in England. And fairly recently too.

There is also a fairly lax account of that religious extremism that occurred in England too, the last bout started during the reign of Puritanism. From as far back as the late 1500's during Elizabeth I's reign, Puritans had tried to steer the Church of England in a certain direction. For around hundred and fifty years or so they pushed for extreme reform. Although they never appeared to achieve full domination of the religious and political fabric of the nation, they got pretty close to it with the Parliamentarian victory of the second Civil War. Cromwell was an unabated Puritan who even sought to ban Christmas celebrations. Because of histories bias towards Cromwell (the reasons of which must wait for another time,) most of this has been mostly forgotten.

Whilst the overall story of Puritans and English-come-British history is obviously a little too complex for a few paragraphs, the overall image is of a fragmented society split between three pillars of Traditionalism, 'Enlightenment' and Religious Extremism expressed by some elements in English society.

So what is it that I've dubbed "England's Nimrud"?

Well it sits approximately twenty-odd miles north of Stonehenge and despite being a World Heritage Site (and the entire area being in the region of twenty times the size of stonehenge,) its actually fairly unheard of. Avebury: a neolithic monument of such epic proportions that it pretty much contains an entire village quite comfortably within its ditches.

Like Stonehenge, nobody is one hundred per cent sure of its purpose (I have my own theories like every other Tom, Dick and Harry,) but one thing that we do know is that throughout the years the huge sarsen stones were broken up for use in construction on farm walls and buildings. Now despite what I've suggested previously about the Puritans, the method of using the stones for building material was not something new, and this is obvious when you look at the villages architecture. The sites destruction seemed to accelerate around the late 1600's though for a brief time.

That been said, a vast amount of damage had already been done to the monument through the 14th century when the population was more or less fully converted to Christianity. The population were brainwashed into associating the once sacred monuments with the Christian concept of Satan, and this is still evident today with many neolithic sites bearing a daemonic name. This ideological obsession (spurred on by clergy) convinced men to go out and dig the stones foundations out, and bury or burn them. Fortunately (or perhaps with some divine influence from the land wights) one man taking part in the destruction of the henge was crushed under a falling stone and may have been the reason why the destruction stopped for some time. The tales have it that he was a barber by trade, and his death was seen as an omen by many so the sarsens were left alone. As it happens, an excavation in the early 20th century actually proved this old tale as being historically correct, when a skeleton was found under a buried sarsen with a coin dating to the 1300's and with his scissors still in a pouch. 

Today, a fair amount of the monument still exists, however the magnitude of its grandeur would not be possible today without the illustrations made by John Aubrey and by William Stukeley during the 17th and early 18th century. The full extent and size of the monument far exceeded what we see today, as much of the existing stone avenue was destroyed, along with two inner-rings and a large 'phallic' monolith which was destroyed apparently when Stukeley was present. Credit where it's due, there would be nothing there today at all had it not been for John Lubbock who purchased the estates in 1871 an attempt to preserve the site, or had it not been for the efforts of Alexander Keiller during the 1930's to dig up and re-erect the buried stones. 

Artist impression of the henge in it's original state

One of the 'accepted views' about the destruction of this site during the 1600's is that this was not religious in nature, and was merely due to an increasing population in the village. They support the theory that in many cases, villagers wanted the stones removed in order to make ploughing fields easier, or to use the huge stones as building material for new homes. The main reason that I would object to this idea is because of Stukeley's own words:


Just before I visited this place... the inhabitants were fallen into the custom of demolishing the stones, chiefly out of covetousness of the little area of ground, each stood on. First they dug great pits in the earth, and buried them. The expence of digging the grave, was more than 30 years purchase of the spot they possessed, when standing. After this, they found out the kanck of burning them, which has made most miserable havock of this famous temple. One Tom Robinson the Herostratus of Abury,* is particularly eminent for this kind of execution, and he very much glories in it. The method is, to dig a pit by the side of the stone, till it falls down, then to burn many loads of straw under it. They draw lines of water along it when heated, and then with smart strokes of a great sledge hammer, its prodigious bulk is divided into many lesser parts. But this Atto de fe** commonly costs thirty shillings in fire and labour, sometimes twice as much. They own too 'tis excessive hard work, for these stones are often 18 foot long, 13 broad, and 6 thick, that their weight crushes the stones in pieces, which they lay under them to make them lie hollow for burning, and for this purpose they raise them with timbers of 20 foot long, and more, by the help of twenty men, but often the timbers were rent to pieces. 

Stukeley goes on to write that a single stone could provide enough pieces to build an ordinary house, but that because of the nature of the stone, such a house "is always moist and dewy in winter, which proves damp and unwholesome, and rots the furniture. The custom of thus destroying them is so late, that I could easily trace the obit of every stone; who did it, for what purpose, and when, and by what method, what house or wall was built out of it, and the like."

Now reading that passage, to me it looks like the method is out of date for even the 1600s. It is clearly labour intensive, expensive and produced homes of inferior quality which remained cold and damp. Religious reasons have to come into this in some way or another. Lets not forget that at the same time that this was occurring, we had issues with the puritans in Government and even the Witchfinder General wandering around the land in search of commission. They gained very little land in destroying the stones, and as Stukeley states, this has more to do with Tom Robinson'sideological beliefs than for any practical reasoning.

In any case, I think its safe to say that the monument at Avebury has received a second wind. It is now a vibrant place to visit with a deep spiritual and cultural connection for hundreds of thousands of people. It receives a huge number of visitors, and is a destination for a worldwide pagan pilgrimage, which is something we can only dream of for Nimrud which was spectacularly blown up with plastic explosives in the last few weeks.

Avebury today.

Whilst there are calls to judge Islam and its more extreme elements for the damage done to historically invaluable monuments across the Middle East, we have to remember that it is only through the chance of time that the same fate did not also befall some of Europe's most treasured sites. The true enemy of civilization and culture is unshakable religious dogma. It has been shown time and time again to turn back humanities development, and ISIS is just another reverberation of that repeating history. Avebury survived by the skin of its teeth and through the hard work of conservationists spanning a hundred years or more. It's new position as a culturally important destination today is good luck. Unfortunately, Nimrud's ran out.

Libya: Order Out of Chaos

(The following post was taken from a previous blog of mine, written back in June. It has since been updated to include links and information on the refugee crisis.)

This is the first part in what is hopefully to become a set of three or four articles about why the world's geopolitics are in such a mess. Admittedly, this I'm only going back as far as the fall of Gaddafi. To fully appreciate the full demise of the World into economic slavery you would have to go back centuries, but given that I haven't got six years to write a full and comprehensive re-write of popular history this will have to do.
I am also painfully aware that there may not be much time to write this for reasons that may become clear towards the end of the set of associated blog posts over the coming weeks. I hope I'm wrong, and I hope that by writing this that the mere act of doing so may bring about a change in the world's zeitgeist.

In any case, the reason why I've decided to write this is because the mainstream news point-blank refuses to do proper investigative journalism on the most important issues. One of the greatest geo-political problems, which I'm sure you'll agree, are the Islamist uprisings that have happened across the Middle East. The Libyan crisis was certainly not necessarily the starting point of ISIS and islamic militancy, but it was the first glimpse into the problems which were to come.

Do you remember how the consortium of British, French and American air forces were called in to impose a no-fly zone in order to stop the nasty Gaddafi from killing innocent civilians?

In fact, Qatar have been funding Islamist's all over the region for reasons unknown (although we can certain have our suspicions.) This started with Libya, but also spread to include support for Syrian 'rebels' too, and presumably also those operating in ISIS now. But more on that in a minute. Just to give you some kind of insight into the workings going on here, Qatar has even admitted that in actual fact, it had sent it's own military personnel into Libya to assist the Islamist's in capturing Tripoli. Sounds all very noble doesn't it. The image portrayed of us in the media, of riding in on silvery flying steeds firing laser guided bombs of justice, is not only wrong though, its an insult to every free thinking person on the globe.
I'll try and explain why, but bare in mind that this is very in depth. I'm not asking you to believe me on all of this, but I do ask that you check out the claims yourself and draw your own conclusions.
Everyone seems to accept that originally, the reason why the civil war in Libya began was because of protesters against Gaddafi's rule were being killed or brutalised by the Libyan armed forces. Now I don't dispute that there probably was genuine protests which saw innocents being killed or injured, but one thing that is clear is that it didn't take long for these 'protesters' to become well armed. I remember it quite well, (although worryingly it was quite a few years ago now!) one week the BBC et al were discussing how civilians were being murdered by Gaddafi's regime, the next week we saw videos of Toyota Hilux trucks with heavy weapons welded on their flatbeds parading through towns and engaging in full combat with the Libyan state. One of the reasons for the rapid military ability of those 'rebels' is attributed to Qatar who are said to have funded the initial uprising, supplied weapons for the 'rebels' and later, was even prepared to do business with local leaders who were selling crude oil before the war was even over. 

At this point you're probably thinking, "hey, why did the rest of the world sit idle whilst Qatar destabilised an entire region". This is real question. America in actual fact is a major ally of Qatar and whilst it's hard to believe, America houses it's U.S. Central Command’s Forward Headquarters and the Combined Air Operations Center in the country. Interestingly, even as far back as 2012, there were alarm calls that a lot of the weapons going to rebels in Libya from Qatar were falling into the hands of Islamists. In fact, despite this concern, America still approved Qatar sending US made weapons into the region. Read here if you don't believe me. Ironically, Gaddafi himself even claimed that those rebels he was fighting were terrorists. The claim originally was met with laughter in our main media, but as we later found out, the guy was right!
Even more mind blowing is the fact that despite Qatar's obvious influence in inflaming the situation in the middle east, just last year in 2014 the US signed an $11bn arms deal with the gulf state.
So whats going on here?!
I don't have all the answers. I mean so far, ( and nor am I going to) I've not said anything which has not come out of the media. The main point though is that these news stories come and they go. They are forgotten very quickly, and very rarely is it that the general public get to really scrutinize long-term news trends in a way that reveals a true agenda. The evidence is there, clear as day, it's not hidden, but the way in which it is reported in broken chunks fails to educate a busy public into truly understanding about what is at stake.

So in Libya's case, violent protests broke out which turned into armed conflict, armed indirectly by the United States and it's key allies. Why? Well Libya was not an Islamist state. It was a relatively free society by the Arab world's standards. Women were educated and held property. There was state healthcare for example. Whilst I certainly don't think he is the model leader for a free society, I think we can all agree that he was certainly the only kind of leader that is capable of keeping a nation in that region from falling into mayhem. Like it has.

The real reason one assumes is really rather simple. Money. In 2007, Tony Blair attended a special envoy to meet Gaddafi in a yurt, in the middle of the desert to do a business deal. In that business meeting there were a few things worthy of note:

·                     BP was to be granted drilling rights to oil wells off the coast of Libya. BP themselves stated that it was "BP's single biggest exploration commitment" and "a welcome return to the country for BP after more than 30 years".

·                     Blair introduced Gaddafi to US bankers, and got an investment plan underway with Goldman Sachs. Within 12 months, following the financial crash, 98% of the investment fund Libya had deposited had been "lost".

·                     Libya was to give up all NBC (nuclear, biological and chemical) weapons to peacekeepers, in return British special forces were to train the Libyan Army, and it also seems that as an added sweetener deal, Libya would become the UK's terrorist interrogation service.

Following the financial crash where Gaddafi's investments moneys 'disappeared' it was clear that there was a change in tact from Libya's leader. He obviously realised in hindsight that he'd done a deal with the devil and gotten himself bitten, so in retaliation for this act of financial sabotage, Gaddafi campaigned for a new currency across the African continent named the Gold Dinar, and the rejection of US dollar for trade. By the way, Libya had a lot of gold pre-invasion. Some estimates had the stockpile of the precious metal as up to $6bn worth. Which is a huge amount if you consider the size of the country and its population.
Without going into the details of why, the short explanation is that if a gold backed currency had taken off across Africa (and there were a few nations that were quite keen on the idea) then it would have damaged the World's dollar backed economy, and badly too. The proxy US led invasion then was nothing more than the US protecting it's own interests, at the same time as making a mint in military deals, re-contruction works (like Iraq was) and as it seems, they must have begun purchasing the oil off of 'rebels' and the newly formed puppet Government for a fraction of what the original agreements were.
So these essentially are the reasons why the Anglo-Franc alliance bombarded Libyan forces and assisted in an Islamist overthrow. And by the way, despite the 'no boots on the ground' assertion by our leaders, our own special forces teams were all over Libya like a rash directing and providing reconnaissance for Allied bomber aircraft. (You know, they had to make sure that their weapons investment was going to pay off.) It meant bigger profits for corporate interests in that region, but has had absolutely no pay off for those living in the region.

The legacy of our intervention in Libya is that:

·                     Taking Gaddafi out of the equation has caused such a power vacuum that now, even the leaders appointed by Allied interventionists have been ousted by Islamists. As early as a few weeks after the capture of Tripoli, the black Islamist flag was seen flying over a major buildings. Ironically, rather than thank the US for their hand in assisting with an overthrow, the US embassy was attacked, and a number of US diplomats were killed in the process.

·                     The corporate rape of Libya has bankrupted the Libyan people and left only anarchy in its wake. The general population in Libya has in no way benefited from the expulsion of Gaddafi. 

·                     The likely case that the golden nest egg Libya had been sitting on has been raided. News reports stated back during the intervention, that in order to pay for staff during the war, Gaddafi was forced to use 20% of the gold reserves. I suspect that this was just the initial take home from the 'liberators'. I've tried to look for figures of gold stocks in Libya today but to no avail, but my bet is that it's non-existent now.

·                     The 'rebel' fighters who had been operating in Libya later left to go and fight in Syria, and have in many cases had a direct hand in creating ISIS. Even in an official capacity, the new Government of Libya, only a few weeks old at this point, was doing arms deals with Syrian insurgents. In actual fact, even the US started doing it openly, with Qatar once again offering military services.

·                     With things so bad in the region due to deliberate destabilisation, thousands of refugees are attempting to claim asylum within the European Union.

On the subject on asylum seekers, it's clear now that Gaddafi's prediction of Libya and the Mediterranean becoming a refugee nightmare have come totally true. Destabilizing Libya has opened up access to the Mediterranean sea to refugees from all over Africa who are pouring into the sea on the understanding that our leaders will pluck them from the water and give them EU citizenship. Why?

On the issue of the refugees, (or the so-called refugees) do not let the liberal bleeding hearts trick you. Many of these people crossing the sea are not as poverty stricken as some may tell us, many are spending thousands on getting transport out to sea where our tax-paid EU navies are ready to rescue them. The funniest thing is that these people are paying good money to militant Islamists who are using these funds to buy weapons and proliferate acts of barbarism across the rest of the Middle East and Central Africa. 

With these illegal migrants passing through Italy and France now desperate to reach the UK in Calais, Britain is now suddenly accepting that it has a "migrant crisis" (despite having had one for many, many years.) The truth is we have no idea how many of these people making their way into Europe have criminal records, or whether they are returning combatants from ISIS and other Islamist groups. If you've read this far into the article you will probably accept that ISIS themselves are rather suspicious with their connections to various international elements.

Finally, mass immigration into Europe is an act of warfare by the forces of international Globalism on European national identities, culture and ethnicities. They do not want a Europe identifiable as Greek, or Danish or English. Their goal is to create such chaos that Europe ceases to be a collection of traditional sovereign states. It is genocide. Or Ethnocide. Whatever you call it, it is certainly putting the future of the white population in Europe in danger. If you doubt this, there was an article back in 2012 by the BBC which highlighted the UN's battleplan to Europe, informing the European Union that they had to "undermine national homogeneity". Which translated means"undermine national race". By using an 'aging population' as an excuse, (like they are now trying to do with Japan,) they hope to encourage ever greater numbers of immigrants. Thing is, the markets could quite easily be reworked in order to work for European families, so that they themselves would be more inclined to have more kids, but one of the added bonuses to immigration is wage suppression.

All these points bring us to the last fact that ties it all together. The reason why Allied forces have not stamped out the more extreme elements within Libya's Government and bring about stability is because the situation at the moment favours destabilisation. They have engineered this crisis. Order out of chaos.

"If I had a choice, I wouldn't be a whitey"

The Perpetual War

Don't really know where to begin with this one. So Paris was attacked last night by a coordinated bunch of Islamist ISIS tossers. One hundred and twenty seven deaths in total, but no doubt many more have suffered physical and mental wounds from which they might not ever heal from. 

Is it a surprise? Not really.

Like many others on the 'right' side of the political spectrum, I saw this coming a mile off. Even without the recent biblical level of immigration we've seen over the past twelve months, multiculturalism was bound to lead to blood shed, but this years invasion has only acerbated that risk. When millions of "refugees", most of them young, angry and fighting-age men flood a continent from a war-torn area you're bound to see the kinds of events as seen last night. To greater emphasize the risk of this, ISIS themselves have for over a year bragged about their ability to easily get their insurgents into Europe, and openly warned of attacks to come.

It's not like it was the first attack of it's kind either, after the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the attack on the Jewish supermarket earlier this year in January. Back on the 5th of November French police also found a Muslim driver transporting arms and explosives into Paris too and was stopped.

Of course despite the inevitability of last night's attack, the media and politicians will still respond to this as though it had caught them off-guard. The truth is, the authorities knew this would happen. Police had confiscated multiple weapons found in containers in Greece in September, and were aware that weapons including missile launchers had been smuggled into France by Islamist insurgents back in August. 

The trouble is, ISIS is likely to be on the payroll of certain Zionist groups and nations, or at least in part supported via key US and EU allies such as Saudi and Qatar. Afterall the inception of ISIS began with the deliberate aiding of 'rebel' forces in both Libya and Syria. Qatar, one of the US's biggest allies in the Middle East even had their conventional military working alongside those of whom would later become ISIS. When Israeli hospitals have been treating 'rebel' soldiers, you really need to question the validity of the official stories.

There are some weird things to consider though. 

• Within hours Facebook had created a 'Paris safe-update' to help loved ones put their minds at ease. 
• Within hours monuments around the world had already set up red, white and blue projectors in 'solidarity' with the French capital.
• It fell on Friday the 13th, a date associated with the end of Knights Templar at the hands of French nobility. Granted this date may well have been chosen by Jihadists for it's association with bad luck. Or was simply coincidence.
• On the same day that the terrorist was stopped on the 5th of November, a French fleet with an aircraft carrier began airstrikes off the coast of Syria against ISIS.
• Amazingly, a "suicide bomber's" passport is found after the attack, confirming at least one of the attackers to be from Syria.
• The French president, Holland, states that this was an act of war and there are pretty clear insinuations that this will lead to further airstrikes on Syria. Just convienient that the French air force is already stationed off the Syrian coast! Coincidental, of course.
• As per usual, (as with any attack) the European Union has made it clear that they will clamp down on 'extremism' and 'hatred'. Cameron and other leaders in Europe have already been pressing this hard for the last few years in any case, however this will no doubt ramp up those efforts. You have to wonder who they're trying to protect however given that Merkel successfully lobbied Facebook to block anti-Islam posts. Indeed the trouble is that when the state intends on incriminating 'extremism', it has the soul authority on what that constitutes. My guess is that it includes me and anyone concerned over the effects of mass-immigration and multiculturalism.

The borders were already expected to be reinstated in Europe as it has begun buckling under the pressure of the ridiculous number of 'refugees', however as there has now been a state of emergency announced, France and other European nations are clearly strongly considering reinstating them.

Now taking all this together, I will just say this. I may be wrong here, and I hope I am, but if I wanted to destroy Europe I would probably do the following: Bring over as many immigrants in one hit as possible after many years of trickle feeding immigration and ferment anger between the indigenous population and the newcomers. Instate a strong surveillance state and restrict the freedoms of the people and lastly create an ever perpetual war that can never be won by anyone.

Wow. That last paragraph sounded frightfully Orwellian, didn't it. I guess that's it then. Destroy Europe, keep everyone fearful and distracted whilst your population is done away with demographically - all the while keeping the carnage going in the Middle East to benefit arms contractors and, most notably, Israel. 

Don't be fooled. This is two pronged. Islam really is a threat, but it is being used by very suspect parties to dismember European society. 

Einherjar Day

Its often quite difficult to rekindle old traditions, that is of course if you can find a tradition from the old ways at all. The problem with a re-constructionist faith is that whilst the basics may be more or less laid down from historical accounts, the smaller customs often left to the imagination. It is laid out in front of us like a puzzle. A puzzle with many pieces unfortunately missing. In an ideal world, we could re-create these old traditions by way of studying history and any lore that we still have access to, but even that still leaves great holes in our customs and our annual calendar. 

Not sure how the Valkyrie intend on
carrying this guy up to Valhalla!

My argument, although not ideal, would be to start new customs wherever there is one of these holes. Anything that our young folk can carry forward into the future is a bonus, so long as the custom has a meaning, a story or a moral to go with it.

One day which approaches us soon in the UK and other nations is Remembrance Sunday, held this week on the 8th (and again on remembrance day held on the 11th each year.) Remembrance day today is there to mark and respect the Allied soldiers who fell in the two World Wars and all other wars up until present day. This is of course a recent commemoration, although it is hard to imagine a time where nations and folk have not held some sort of vigil for their fallen warriors in the past.

Within the Heathen community, Einherjar Day has become a recognised holy day. (The Einherjar are those who have died in battle and joined Woden's hall in Valhalla.) Whilst there is no consensus within the 'Old Ways' (be it Asatru, Odinism etc) as to what this date should be, in the UK it seems most logical to place it at the time at which the rest of society marks the death of their soldiers. Through a logical appropriation (although in this case obviously not a negative one) of mainstream society, it means heathens are adhering to something positive whilst not outcasting themselves.

I think the heathen mindset however respects all of our folk, from all across Europe who have died in battles. From the first Saxon folk who took up arms against the Wīlisc defenders, Luftwaffe pilots who bombed London in WWII, to our young lads who served in the Middle East all the way up until the present day. To the Heathen mindset, there is no longer tribal differences between kin at Odin's hall. All are welcomed and treated as brother. The idea that we might hate somebody just because they were fighting for the other side, even after death, is self-defeating as much as it is dishonorable. 

I implore you then to remember the fallen, as most do at this time of year. Do not mourn though. Eat well, and raise a glass to them. They have not passed on, but live on in eternal glory. Remember them as young men and women, prepared to risk their lives in the line of duty. In the eyes of the heathen, forever doing battle along side Woden or Freya. Hail the glorious dead.

The Meaning of Halloween

Every year I see the signs of Halloween in the shops come mid-September and I’m reminded of the strange relationship that modern society has with our ancient European customs. On the one hand, all the major festivals are still annually represented. Easter, Christmas (as well as New Years,) and Halloween are after all the three biggest festivals we celebrate in the Western world today. On the other hand, the meanings have been so far removed as to make them feel culturally impotent. Our main festivals have been butchered by capitalism to the point where in many instances, they no longer bring joy but financial despair.

I’m sure everyone will be familiar with the commercialisation of Christmas and to a lesser extent Easter, but when it comes to Halloween I’m probably not wrong to assume that the vast majority of the public don’t really know what Halloween is, or what it represents. If the public did, I would like to think that we as a society wouldn’t be so quick as to treat the festival with such disdain.

Halloween, like Christmas and Easter, is a European festival that comes from way beyond the dawn of Christianity. Simply put, in almost all European cultures Halloween is a time for honouring the dead and was originally observed by our pagan ancestors. The word Halloween literally means ‘holy evening’ when taken under the Christian guise, but is also known within most of the pagan community as Samhain. As a pagan festival, it is often presumed to be of Gaelic or “Celtic”, in its origin. However that been said, this is an overly simplistic view. Aspects of Halloween were seen all across Europe, and I really don’t understand why everything pagan pertaining to Northern Europe has to be given the “Celtic” title.

Jack-O-Lanterns were said to scare aware evil spirits which on Halloween could cross over the spiritual plains, except they were originally carved from turnips in Ireland seeing as pumpkins originally only grew in America. In Scandinavia and certain Germanic tribes, children who were coming of age that year dressed up in the clothes of their dead ancestors and walked about the village as a sign that they had effectively been “reborn”, a symbol if you like of a biological link which in a literal way means eternal life. Other places would light bonfires and even jump over the flames in a bid to ward off evil spirits. The connection with apples (candied apples, or apple bobbing) is a link to a pagan symbol of everlasting life, especially within Germanic or Scandinavian lore. Basically what we have today with modern Halloween is essentially a mash-up of varying but ultimately very similar cultural celebrations, mainly from Northern Europe.

As this blog is intended to bring about musings on English culture though, I feel it rather pertinent to defend the Anglo-Saxon celebration of Halloween. Most places you go to on the internet for reference will claim that Samhain is strictly a Celtic thing, but as we’ve already discussed this is not necessarily the case. In all honesty, it seems highly unlikely that the Catholic, Orthodox and certain Protestant churches would have adopted All Saints Day across Europe if the cultural event it was replacing (this was common practice, hence Easter is recognised in Spring, and Christmas at Yule) was only observed in the far flung extremities of Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Perhaps it is more realistic to assume that those mountainous isolated regions saw the least amount of persecution which enabled more of the old traditions to survive.

We also have to consider other evidence, such as the ‘Witches Sabbath’, which was said to have been held on the night of the 31^st of October in isolated regions across England and on the continent too including Germany, France, Italy and Hungary to name but a few. A night where those who still keep the old ways would meet in secret to do their traditional, pagan rituals. This cannot be seen as a coincidence, but more as a re-affirmation that Halloween is a real festival, probably older than most give it credit for.

The Anglo-Saxons called November ‘blotmonað’, or blood month. That sounds like something pretty barbaric, but the blot is a ritual in which an offering (usually cattle) were offered up to the Gods and ancestors. Given that the month starts with Halloween (remember that in those days, a day began with the sundown of the previous day) it makes perfect logical sense. Especially when we consider that after Christianisation, the day was observed with an abstinence of meat. This could either mean the foregoing of meat was done by the pagans and carried over into the new faith, as meat on that evening was reserved solely for the departed as a gift, or it was an attempt by the Church later on to try and prevent cattle being offered to ‘false’ Gods. Either way, it still makes a pretty good case for a European-wide festival, or at least Germanic celebration. Clearly not just Gaelic.

What happened to England’s Festivals Though?

In England today, just like in Scotland, some of these festivals survived. There is still a number of villages that celebrate the night in weird and wonderful ways, but in England I have a sneaky suspicion that something that’s considered a relatively new thing is actually something very pagan. Guy Fawkes Night today might be celebrated with the letting off of annoying pyrotechnics, but traditionally it’s marked by the burning of an effigy of Guy Fawkes. I’m sure most in England will be familiar with the story of Guy Fawkes and the whole ‘Burning the Guy’ thing, if you don’t please google it.

It is interesting that the time at which Guy Fawkes Night is observed is so close to Samhain.  As we’ve already said, Samhain was very often observed with bonfires. Also, we need to take into consideration the politics at the time in 1605 at the time of the gun powder plot. England was under the control of an increasingly Puritan Government. The culmination of the Puritan power would eventually lead to Cromwell trying to ban Christmas fifty years later because it was too ‘pagan’. When we consider that Guy Fawkes was hung, not burnt to death for his attempted terrorism, the whole thing about burning an effigy of him seems pretty absurd. Perhaps the timing of the attack was coincidence, or perhaps the whole thing was some sort of conspiracy by the state to try and take control of the meaning of Halloween as a festival, but either way I find it amazingly too coincidental. Two cultural events within one week both burning bonfires. I suspect that the State at the time simply said that the bonfires would be accepted, so long as the effigy of Guy Fawkes was placed upon it. In this way, the public managed to keep their tradition, but the meaning was forever skewed.

I think it’s probably important to point out that except from some isolated villages (at least in the United Kingdom,) many of these festivals disappeared almost entirely until America amalgamated the varying traditions into a commercial product to re-sell to Western Europe. In a way, we should be thankful that at least some of the traditions have been saved, albeit in a perverted form, but like I said in the beginning, if people truly knew the real meaning behind Halloween, it wouldn’t be celebrated with such mockery. Whilst dressing up as horror characters and eating vast amounts of E-numbers may seem fun, the real meaning behind the night is meant to be respect for the dead. In a society today which fears growing old and laments too much on the present – maybe a more serious observance of Halloween is what society is missing.

The Church in recent years has certainly shirked away from keeping this festival in the limelight, so I suppose that the onus should fall once again in the hands of pagans to re-spread the true meaning once more.

All that been said, enjoy the evening and stay safe this Halloween!