My, I wonder how and why that could be?
Halloween taps America’s spiritual void
The holiday just keeps getting more popular. Seven in 10 expect to celebrate it in some way this Oct. 31, up from about six in 10 last year, according to a National Retail Federation report. This is the most in the nine years the NRF has been tracking…. Christmas and Easter may be secularized these days, relative to their past, but they remain Christian holidays. People value Halloween, like Valentine’s Day, because they can tell themselves that it’s not merely secularized but actually secular, which is to say, not Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim.
But as much as we’d like it to be, Halloween isn’t secular. It is Pagan. There’s nothing else to call a set of ceremonies in which people utter magical phrases, flirt with the night and evoke the dead.
I always enjoyed Halloween as a kid, but we don’t celebrate it since it is virtually unknown in continental Europe. I don’t see anything wrong with kiddy trick-or-treating and I don’t think that most people are actually celebrating it per se. That being said, as the pagan world continues to encroach upon Christendom, don’t be surprised as the celebrations grow darker and more serious.
Pagan worship primarily concerns propitiation. In other words, they are religions based on pure fear rather than repentance, contract, or submission. The West is at most mildly nervous now, the real pagan revival is unlikely to seriously begin until it reaches a state of genuine fear and desperation. And Halloween celebrations will likely prove to be a good means of tracking its development.