Ancient Origins of Halloween
Halloween's origins
date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in).
The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago in the area that is now Ireland,
the United Kingdom and northern France, celebrated their new year on
November 1. This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the
beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often
associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the
new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead
became blurred. On the night of October 31 they celebrated Samhain, when
it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. In
addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the
presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or
Celtic priests, to make predictions about the future. For a people
entirely dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were
an important source of comfort and direction during the long, dark
winter.
To commemorate the event, Druids built huge sacred bonfires, where
the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the
Celtic deities. During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes,
typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell
each other's fortunes. When the celebration was over, they re-lit their
hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the
sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.
By 43 A.D., the Roman Empire had conquered the majority of Celtic
territory. In the course of the four hundred years that they ruled the
Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the
traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain. The first was Feralia, a day
in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing
of the dead. The second was a day to honour Pomona, the Roman goddess of
fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple and the incorporation
of this celebration into Samhain probably explains the tradition of
"bobbing" for apples that is practised today on Halloween.
On May 13, 609 A.D., Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome
in honour of all Christian martyrs, and the Catholic feast of All Martyrs
Day was established in the Western church. Pope Gregory III (731–741)
later expanded the festival to include all saints as well as all
martyrs, and moved the observance from May 13 to November 1. By the 9th
century the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands,
where it gradually blended with and supplanted the older Celtic rites.
In 1000 A.D., the Church would make November 2 All Souls' Day, a day to
honour the dead. It is widely believed today that the Church was
attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related,
but church-sanctioned holiday. All Souls Day was celebrated similarly to
Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as
saints, angels and devils. The All Saints Day celebration was also
called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English ''Alholowmesse''
meaning All Saints' Day) and the night before it, the traditional night
of Samhain in the Celtic religion, began to be called All-hallows Eve
and, eventually, Hallowe'en.
Halloween Comes to America
Celebration
of Halloween was extremely limited in colonial New England because of
the rigid Protestant belief systems there. Halloween was much more
common in Maryland
and the southern colonies. As the beliefs and customs of different
European ethnic groups as well as the American Indians meshed, a
distinctly American version of Halloween began to emerge. The first
celebrations included "play parties," public events held to celebrate
the harvest, where neighbours would share stories of the dead, tell each
other's fortunes, dance and sing. Colonial Halloween festivities also
featured the telling of ghost stories and mischief-making of all kinds.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, annual autumn festivities were
common, but Halloween was not yet celebrated everywhere in the country.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, America was flooded
with new immigrants. These new immigrants, especially the millions of
Irish fleeing Ireland's potato famine of 1846, helped to popularise the
celebration of Halloween nationally. Taking from Irish and English
traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and go house to
house asking for food or money, a practice that eventually became
today's "trick-or-treat" tradition. Young women believed that on
Halloween they could divine the name or appearance of their future
husband by doing tricks with yarn, apple parings or mirrors.
In the late 1800s, there was a move in America to mold Halloween into
a holiday more about community and neighbourly get-togethers than about
ghosts, pranks and witchcraft. At the turn of the century, Halloween
parties for both children and adults became the most common way to
celebrate the day. Parties focused on games, foods of the season and
festive costumes. Parents were encouraged by newspapers and community
leaders to take anything "frightening" or "grotesque" out of Halloween
celebrations. Because of these efforts, Halloween lost most of its
superstitious and religious overtones by the beginning of the twentieth
century.
By the 1920s and 1930s,
Halloween had become a secular, but community-centred holiday, with
parades and town-wide parties as the featured entertainment. Despite the
best efforts of many schools and communities, vandalism began to plague
Halloween celebrations in many communities during this time. By the 1950s,
town leaders had successfully limited vandalism and Halloween had
evolved into a holiday directed mainly at the young. Due to the high
numbers of young children during the 1950s baby boom, parties moved
from town civic centres into the classroom or home, where they could be
more easily accommodated. Between 1920 and 1950, the centuries-old
practice of trick-or-treating was also revived. Trick-or-treating was a
relatively inexpensive way for an entire community to share the
Halloween celebration. In theory, families could also prevent tricks
being played on them by providing the neighbourhood children with small
treats. A new American tradition was born, and it has continued to grow.
Today, Americans spend an estimated $6 billion annually on Halloween,
making it the country's second largest commercial holiday only after Christmas.
Today's Halloween Traditions
The
American Halloween tradition of "trick-or-treating" probably dates back
to the early All Souls' Day parades in England. During the festivities,
poor citizens would beg for food and families would give them pastries
called "soul cakes" in return for their promise to pray for the family's
dead relatives. The distribution of soul cakes was encouraged by the Church as a way to replace the ancient practice of leaving food and wine
for roaming spirits. The practice, which was referred to as "going
a-souling" was eventually taken up by children who would visit the
houses in their neighbourhood and be given ale, food, and money.
The tradition of dressing in costume for Halloween has both European
and Celtic roots. Hundreds of years ago, winter was an uncertain and
frightening time. Food supplies often ran low and, for the many people
afraid of the dark, the short days of winter were full of constant
worry. On Halloween, when it was believed that ghosts came back to the
earthly world, people thought that they would encounter ghosts if they
left their homes. To avoid being recognised by these ghosts, people
would wear masks when they left their homes after dark so that the
ghosts would mistake them for fellow spirits. On Halloween, to keep
ghosts away from their houses, people would place bowls of food outside
their homes to appease the ghosts and prevent them from attempting to
enter.
Halloween Superstitions
Halloween
has always been a holiday filled with mystery, magic and superstition.
It began as a Celtic end-of-summer festival during which people felt
especially close to deceased relatives and friends. For these friendly
spirits, they set places at the dinner table, left treats on doorsteps
and along the side of the road and lit candles to help loved ones find
their way back to the spirit world. Today's Halloween ghosts are often
depicted as more fearsome and malevolent, and our customs and
superstitions are scarier too. We avoid crossing paths with black cats,
afraid that they might bring us bad luck. This idea has its roots in the Middle Ages
when many people believed that witches avoided detection by turning
themselves into cats. We try not to walk under ladders for the same
reason. This superstition may have come from the ancient Egyptians, who
believed that triangles were sacred; it also may have something to do
with the fact that walking under a leaning ladder tends to be fairly
unsafe. And around Halloween, especially, we try to avoid breaking
mirrors, stepping on cracks in the road or spilling salt.
But what about the Halloween traditions and beliefs that today's
trick-or-treaters have forgotten all about? Many of these obsolete
rituals focused on the future instead of the past and the living instead
of the dead. In particular, many had to do with helping young women
identify their future husbands and reassuring them that they would
someday—with luck, by next Halloween—be married. In 18th-century
Ireland, a matchmaking cook might bury a ring in her mashed potatoes on
Halloween night, hoping to bring true love to the diner who found it. In
Scotland, fortune-tellers recommended that an eligible young woman name
a hazelnut for each of her suitors and then toss the nuts into the
fireplace. The nut that burnt to ashes rather than popping or
exploding, the story went, represented the girl's future husband. (In
some versions of this legend, confusingly, the opposite was true: The
nut that burnt away symbolised a love that would not last.) Another
tale had it that if a young woman ate a sugary concoction made out of
walnuts, hazelnuts and nutmeg before bed on Halloween night she would
dream about her future husband. Young women tossed apple-peels over
their shoulders, hoping that the peels would fall on the floor in the
shape of their future husbands' initials; tried to learn about their
futures by peering at egg yolks floating in a bowl of water; and stood
in front of mirrors in darkened rooms, holding candles and looking over
their shoulders for their husbands' faces. Other rituals were more
competitive. At some Halloween parties, the first guest to find a burr
on a chestnut-hunt would be the first to marry; at others, the first
successful apple-bobber would be the first down the aisle.
Of course, whether we are asking for romantic advice or trying to
avoid seven years of bad luck, each one of these Halloween superstitions
relies on the good will of the very same "spirits" whose presence the
early Celts felt so keenly.
Here I'm leaving a summary video for you. Enjoy it and have a happy, or maybe unhappy Halloween.
