Halloween with P.L. Travers

During her stay as a writer-in-residence at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts in the autumn of 1966, P.L. Travers was invited to give a lecture about myths, fairy tales and their connection to everyday life. The following year the lecture was published in ‘The Quarterly Journal (Library of Congress, USA) and later in 1989 included in P.L. Travers’s compilation of essays published under the title ‘What the Bee Knows’.    

Because the lecture happened on Halloween, P.L. Travers concluded with a brief comment on its history, which she told the audience began as a pagan celebration of the dead and later on was integrated into a Christian celebration by one of the Popes, ‘Boniface IV, perhaps, in the seventh century, who decided to do away with all the pagan saturnalia and turn it from what it so significantly was, into a commemoration of the saints and martyrs’. 

Normally I should have taken her word on the matter, she knew so much and I so little in comparison, yet for some unknown reason I felt compelled to do a quick factual check. To my surprise I discovered that it was not Pope Boniface IV in the seventh century, but Pope Gregory III, in the eighth who decided to morph the old beliefs into the new Christian religion. 

Obviously, her historical reference was wrong but getting the dates right was beside the point she wanted to make, and in all fairness, she did use the word ‘perhaps’, meaning she was not sure of the factual accuracy of her statement. Yet, its truthfulness remains, the old beliefs were indeed transmuted into the new system of beliefs but were unfortunately, in her opinion, deprived of their essential purpose. Luckily, people knew better than Pope Gregory III and a version of this pagan celebration remained to our days.  

In ‘Only Connect’ P.L. Travers acknowledged our human need to remember the dead and to come to grips with our own grieving and fears of death and the unknown. These needs, old as humanity, need an outlet, a ritual to allow us to turn our faces back to life.  

From time immemorial, stories are what allows us to create meaning out of our human experiences, and fairy tales were for P.L. Travers the guideposts in our personal lives. Then, it is only normal that she had written her own version of this pagan celebration in Hallowe’en a story in Mary Poppins in the Park, where not ghosts but the shadows of characters from fairy tales come to party in the Park under a Blue Full Moon. I have written about this story before, and you can read the blogposts here and here.

Now rereading ‘Only Connect’ leads me to believe that the idea for the story may well have been inspired by her own observations of the modern ritual of trick-or-treating; a night when children in the guise of fairy tales characters, heroes and villains, hand in hand, roam the streets at night in search of treats.

Happy Halloween!