Adapted extract from a letter to The Natural Death Centre.
I hope the 1995 English Day of the Dead on April 23rd was a great success, as you are probably right about the psychological advantage of holding it in the spring. This should make it cheerful, like the Mexican Day of the Dead and unlike traditional North European wakes. But it almost certainly has no basis, as you claim for it, in traditional English practice.
Reference to a Pagan Day of the Dead on May 13th, transferred to November 1st by Pope Gregory IV in 834, can be found on page 126 of Janet and Stewart Farrar's Eight Sabbats for Witches, published in 1981. This story seems to be confused. In 837 (not 834) Pope Gregory instituted the autumn feast of the Christian dead, All Souls, moved from its original date of May 13th (the date when Pantheon, the Roman temple of all deities, had been rededicated to the saints and martyrs) to November 1st. May 13th was a Christian feast of the dead, not a Pagan one. The move to November 1st took place under pressure from the Church in Germany, to create a festival for the gloomy days of autumn and early winter. The autumn Christian festival was invented and popularised by Einhard, Charlemagne's archbishop, and it might have been adopted in emulation by the English under Offa, the king in Europe who treated with Charlemagne as a near-equal. Whether the new date coincided at the time with an established Pagan feast, later known to the Vikings as Winter Nights, is unclear.
Roman Paganism had the Lemuria, a gloomy festival of the riddance of unwanted ghosts, on May 7th-9th, but this does not seem to have influenced any Christian feasts or to have been introduced further north. In Baltic paganism, the feast of Pergrubius, god of flowers, is on April 23rd, but it is a feast of life not death. English contact with the Baltic only began with the Danish raids in the early 19th Century, and it is unlikely to say the least that a Pagan festival would have been introduced into an officially Christian country. The feast of Pergrubius, or St George's Flower Day, might be a nice innovation, but I think, alas, that the indigenous Day of the Dead is a fiction.
Prudence Jones, 21 Shelly Garden, Cambridge CB3 0BT (tel 01223 323299).