We know Halloween is the Roman holiday of All Hallows Eve, followed the next morning by All Saints’ Day when all the saints are venerated.
And we should also recognize it to be a counterfeit of the Biblical holiday, the Last Great Day, which celebrates the resurrection of the redeemed with perfect holy bodies to live for eternity, not just a one-night reprieve from the grave with grotesque bodies.
But, did you know that Halloween is a leftover Cross-quarter holiday that falls on the halfway point between the Autumnal Equinox and the Winter Solstice? The Solstices mark the extreme northern and southern positions of the sun. And the Equinoxes are the midpoint in between the Solstices. The Equinoxes are not noticeable in the sky unless you count the days from the Solstice or if you erect some kind of a marker to know when the sun hits that midpoint. These positions of the sun were the foundation of the ancient pagan sun worship.
The four quarter points in the year, when the sun is halfway between an equinox and a Solstice, also marked Pagan holidays. One of these Cross-quarter holidays is Halloween. May Day and Groundhog Day are other left over Cross-quarter holidays that have turned into something innocent-looking today.
But as a fourth history of this holiday, Halloween was celebrated as the Day when the Seven Sisters, or the Pleiades star cluster, reached its highest point in the Heavens at midnight–called its culmination. The holiday that celebrated this was Samhain.
Since the stars do not remain fixed in their locations over the centuries, the day for Pleiades to reach this point has migrated to Nov. 21. But in the 11th and 12th Centuries, the Cross-quarter and the midnight Pleiades culmination both occurred on October 31 according to the then-used Julian Calendar. This explains how the date became fixed on this date, even though the Cross-quarter doesn’t occur until November 7 according to today’s Gregorian calendar. The Julian calendar was a week off track from our Gregorian calendar, so these two days called Oct. 31 and Nov. 7 are actually the same date.
- The Roman All Hallows Eve
- A Counterfeit of The Feast of the Resurrection, or The Last Great Day
- The Cross-quarter day of Sun Worship
- Samhain—the culmination at midnight of the Pleiades in star worship
All these days of worship combined, and then scrambled a little with the change in calendars, and you have the fully amalgamated holiday of Halloween. And today the churches are changing it further by turning it into a harvest festival instead of acknowledging God’s holiday of Tabernacles and avoiding the pagan worship entirely.
