Bones, Blood, and Blessed Amnesia

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  • Emiliano Girina's avatar Artist
    Emiliano G...
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    Read prompt
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    Z-Image Turbo
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    6h ago
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More about Bones, Blood, and Blessed Amnesia

Bones, Blood, and Blessed Amnesia

Every October, a familiar ritual unfolds. Voices rise from pulpits and comment sections to denounce Halloween as macabre, pagan, satanic, a flirtation with death that good Christians should reject. Plastic skeletons are condemned. Painted skulls provoke outrage. Children in costumes are treated as emissaries of darkness. And all the while, Christianity stands ankle-deep in bones, soaked in blood, serenely pretending not to notice.

This is not ignorance. It is selective blindness elevated to virtue.

Christianity does not merely tolerate the macabre; it canonized it. The central symbol of the faith is an instrument of execution. Churches are adorned with a tortured corpse nailed to wood, ribs exposed, wounds bleeding, head crowned with thorns. This is not subtle symbolism. It is state violence aestheticized, sanctified, and placed above the altar. No jack-o’-lantern has ever come close.

Relics push the contradiction further. Finger bones, skulls, femurs, teeth—preserved, displayed, kissed, paraded through streets in gilded containers. The dead are not remembered quietly; they are curated. Entire cathedrals are decorated with human remains arranged into patterns, chandeliers of skulls, walls of tibias. When this is done by Christians, it is reverence. When Halloween does it with papier-mâché, it is depravity.

Then comes blood. Christianity is obsessed with it. Washed in the blood. Saved by the blood. Drinking the blood. A weekly ritual reenacts symbolic cannibalism: flesh eaten, blood consumed, death internalized as salvation. If a pre-Christian cult had invented this liturgy, it would be Exhibit A in a sermon about pagan horror.

The calendar itself betrays the lie. Christmas sits neatly on top of earlier solstice festivals. Easter cannibalizes spring fertility rites, eggs and rebirth repackaged with a resurrection. All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day occupy the same temporal space as Samhain, the ancient festival of the dead. Halloween is not an intrusion; it is the echo that Christianity failed to erase. The Church did not abolish paganism. It absorbed it, renamed it, and declared victory.

Even Christian art is saturated with decay. Martyrdom scenes linger lovingly on torn flesh, severed heads, flayed skin. Saints are identified by the instruments of their execution like trophies: grids, wheels, arrows, saws. Children learn these stories early, presented as edifying. Suffering is not an accident in Christianity. It is a feature.

So when Halloween is accused of glorifying death, the accusation rings hollow. Halloween knows it is playing with symbols. Christianity insists its symbols are above scrutiny. That is the difference. One wears a mask for a night. The other claims the mask is truth itself.

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