"The True Story of All Souls’ Day" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "The Return Of The Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, And The Transparent Veil Of The Pagan Mind"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
November 2
The True Story of All Souls’ Day
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According to the monk who wrote Odilo’s biography, the story began with a
storm. A pilgrim returning from Jerusalem was driven onto a barren island,
where a lone hermit told him a secret: nearby, a chasm opened onto Purgatory,
and out of it came the cries of suffering souls, mingled with the voices of
demons complaining that the prayers of the monks of Cluny kept stealing their
prisoners away. The pilgrim carried the news home to Cluny’s abbot, and the
abbot, so the legend goes, responded by giving the dead a day of their own.
It is a wonderful story, and it is
almost certainly not why the celebration on November 2nd exists. The documented
history is quieter, and after the last two days of Samhain and Día de Muertos,
considerably more instructive…
_-_The_Day_of_the_Dead_(1859).jpg)
Odilo, the fifth abbot of Cluny, who lived from 962 to 1048, decreed in the year 998 that every monastery in the Cluniac network should set aside the day after All Saints for special prayers and the Office for the Dead. The decree survives, printed in the Bollandists’ great collection of saints’ lives, the Acta Sanctorum. Cluny’s reach did the rest: its houses formed the largest monastic network in Europe, the custom traveled with them, and by the end of the thirteenth century the date was close to universal across the Latin West. Some historians think Odilo formalized a custom already taking shape rather than inventing it outright, which would make his decree less a bolt from the blue than a remarkably effective act of standardization.
The pilgrim story is real only in the
sense that someone wrote it down. Jotsaldus, a monk of Cluny who began a
biography of Odilo around 1049, the year after the abbot’s death, reports that
Odilo told him the tale himself, and Peter Damian later retold it. It reads as
pious hagiography doing a specific job: dramatizing the belief that the prayers
of the living can shorten the sufferings of the dead. That belief, the doctrine
of Purgatory, is the entire engine of the feast. Catholic tradition finds
scriptural footing for it in an episode in 2 Maccabees, where Judas Maccabeus
arranges an offering for fallen soldiers, a book Protestants do not count as
canonical, which is one reason the Reformation, having rejected Purgatory, had
little use for the day (although some Anglican churches it observe it).
The more persistent myth about All
Souls’ Day has nothing to do with hermits. Rather, the Church scheduled All Saints and All Souls
on November 1st and 2nd to bury Samhain. The historian Kyle Smith, author of Cult of the Dead,
points out that the ninth-century pope Gregory IV, who gets blamed for the
November 1st date, was ratifying a day already observed as All Saints in many
parts of Europe, not aiming at the Celts. And the stated reasons for Odilo’s
decision, the pilgrim legend included, concern Purgatory and intercessory
prayer, not pagans. Cluny under Odilo was busy recording the names of its lay
benefactors so the monks could pray for them after death. A feast for the dead
grew out of that monastic machinery in Burgundy, a long way from the Hill of
Tlachtga. None of this means folk customs around the dead never mingled with Allhallowtide over the following
centuries, in Britain and Ireland especially. It means the feast was not
designed as their replacement, and the difference between those two claims is
the whole point.
What the feast did produce, in
England, is one of the best-documented folk customs of the season: souling.
On or around All Souls’, the poor, and later children, went door to door
singing verses and receiving small spiced soul cakes in return for a promise of
prayers for the household's dead. The researcher Barbara Ravelhofer,
who studies “soul cakes,” has noted how different this is from the implied
threat of modern trick-or-treating: souling was a performance given in
exchange for charity. She proposes that trick-or-treating is a commercialized
descendant, a lineage plausible enough to be widely repeated and hard to prove
link by link. The custom outlived the doctrine that produced it. After the
Reformation rejected Purgatory, souling continued among Protestants and
Catholics alike into the 1930s, and a few Cheshire villages still perform souling
plays today.
The Eastern Orthodox churches keep several commemorations of the dead spread across the year, mostly on Saturdays, while the Latin Church gathered its prayers into a single day and eventually a single month; November remains the month of the Holy Souls. The arrangement came with a clear rule that separated it from older habits: the dead are prayed for, not consulted. The medieval Church condemned necromancy, the attempt to summon the dead for information or help, and the logic of the feast runs the other way, with the living serving the dead. The older European picture, in which the dead returned of their own accord and moved freely among the living, is the world the scholar Claude Lecouteux reconstructed from sagas and legends, and it makes a revealing backdrop for the Church’s own, very different, way of keeping faith with the departed.
Which brings this three-day stretch
full circle: Samhain’s household precautions, Día de Muertos’s marigold
paths, and an abbot’s list of names for his monks to pray over at Cluny are
three answers to the same unembarrassed question: what do the living owe the
dead? None of them needs an invented god or a hidden conspiracy to explain
it. The oldest explanation is also the simplest: People die, and the people who
loved them want some day, and some way, to honor them.
The Return Of The Dead:
Ghosts, Ancestors, And The Transparent Veil Of The Pagan Mind
By
Claude Lecouteux | Translated by Jon E. Graham | Inner Traditions
Claude Lecouteux’s The Return of
the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind,
published in English by Inner Traditions in 2009 in a translation by Jon E.
Graham, first appeared in France in 1996. Lecouteux, a professor emeritus of
medieval literature and civilization at the Sorbonne, died in November 2025,
which makes this a fitting book to read, and a fitting author to remember, on a
day devoted to remembering. His argument is that the line modern readers draw
between the living and the dead was far more porous for medieval Europeans, who
met the dead as corporeal presences able to cross back at will, sometimes as
troublemakers, sometimes as guardians of the moral order. Medieval
Christianity, he argues, gradually turned that bodily revenant into the
disembodied ghost we know now, and the sanctified churchyard replaced the
burial mound on the family farm.
That is exactly the context that
makes All Souls’ Day legible. The feast is the Church’s own answer to the
question of how the living should relate to the dead: through intercession,
organized prayer, and memory held by the community, rather than through meeting
the dead on their own terms. Lecouteux shows you the older picture it was working
alongside.
His material is mostly literary, sagas, legends, and medieval narratives, so the pagan beliefs he describes are reconstructed from texts written down in Christian centuries, a difficulty he addresses openly. The focus is Germanic and Scandinavian rather than Celtic, so readers hoping for Samhain-specific material won't find it here. And it is a dense scholarly survey, with endnotes running to some thirty-four pages according to one reviewer, rather than a casual read. But for readers who finished today’s post wondering what the world looked like before, and beside, the prayers of Cluny’s monks, it’s a thoughtful and rewarding place to look.
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